Knowing who you are.
This topic is one that has been rolling around in my mind for a while now. I think for many of us this is something that we don't really grasp until much later in life. For others, they are so full of who they are that it pours out of them and there is no doubt when you encounter these kind. For most though I think it is a process.
It has been a process for me ,and one that I am still not finished with yet ,but getting a lil more confident in- who I" truly" am.
I think what might have started this thought is when I posted about my grandmother being so much of who I am and then reading a fellow bloggers post about his dad, and yet another blog about how we try to identify ourselves with what we wear,what car we drive,what music we listen to, what sports team is our fav, etc... These are external things that all too often come to identify the eternal soul inside.
I think some things that help in knowing who you are is knowing where you came from, also where you are going but mostly for all those who follow Christ it is the same; We are His .
Tonight at youth group the topic was being God's vessel and Knowing that you are chosen. In small group time a comment was made that knowing that "you are chosen by God" is important because it keeps you from doing some things that you shouldn't but also encourages you to branch out and do some things that maybe you wouldn't if you didn't have your faith.
Anyway, after tonight I thought that I would put this topic out there and see if there are more words of wisdom about it .
I have to say that I don't think it is a healthy thing to spend too much time thinking about ourselves I just hope that when the rubber meets the road on this journey i won't take the wrong turn just cause I don't know who I am or where I am going.(Hope that makes sense) If not don't comment!!!
6 comments:
wow noel...now you've gone and done it. this is the kind of topic that just stops everything, and forces you to slow down and think. when you remove "things" from the equation of how we define ourselves, what are you left with? i need to think about this one...
thanks...
yeah... hmmmmmmm.... i'm w/ denden on this one. this is really good & challenging, noel. i'm leaning towards IDENIFICATION in God (who he says i am) & attempting/exercising the gifts that the HS has placed in me. add that to His moral will (Bible principles/truths) for me & add that to the personality he gave me. it seems multi-leveled/faceted at the minimum. who i really am, if i understand correctly, & push aside the crud, is whom you'll see on the outside. i like certain things on the outside, because of me on the inside: sports, poetry, etc.. so, i guess my thought is this: hopefully, we can all move towards being truly authentic. not what we think we should be & not what we think others say we should be- i think this is where the mistake of identifying w/ external factors, in a lop-sided way, is just an indication of not IDENTIFYING w/ Him. i've struggled good & long concerning my IDENTITY. i've tried just about every external label or thing that i thought would make me cool & accepted. quite honestly, i recently had a revelational realization: i am who He says I am in the Bible (that’s my true IDENTITY). the gifts & personality that he gave me are His masterpiece. these are all internal/soul truths & not defined by the external/outside. okay… i've said enough….hopefully that's clear… bout as clear as mud, i bet…..
so lions fan is not a good answer? aren't you a bo sox fan, noel? you guys know more about finding identification in fandom that anyone else, methinks.
this is a really hard question. it's one that i often wrestle with not only in my own life but with my daughter and sometimes even wife. when i tell my lovely, smart, charming, LOUD daughter that she needs to stop talking so much in school or else - the comeback used to go like "that's just the way i am, i can't help it."
unfortunately, that's the way we often look at ourselves in areas that God is trying to work on us in. sorry, God, that's just me. deal with it . . .
When I struggle with this question, I too worry about taking the wrong turn on the road of life. I often must take solace in the scripture that promises "he'll keep our feet on the path" "we may stumble but we won't fall" "he is faithful to complete the work he began in me" and a strange verse in Isaiah where he talks about "leading the blind along paths they had never been before".
As jaybird said, we do frequently try to be what we "should" be, not only by society's standards but by "the church's" standards also. By this I mean church as an institution, not a specific church and not church as in the complete body of Christ. We seek to look good in other people's eyes instead of striving to do God's will. We think that just because what we're doing looks good to people from the outside, that we are pleasing God, when really we're just pleasing people.
BBoss and I, and a couple of other friends have been going through the book Blue Like Jazz and there is one particular line that I really like about identity.
"Something got crossed in the wires, and I became the person I should be and not the person I am."
So I guess what I'm trying to say is, frequently we look to what people say we should be and we leave behind ourselves in the process. We forget to be who God made us to be.
I too have walked through this conversation in the past months with my then interns. We were talking about our identities & also our decisions & how they intertwine with each other. One of the lads was really struggling with not being defined by your job title or what you do. He felt that I was a consultant first, rather than a person/husband/son/brother/friend/ and finally consultant. He's not a bad guy, but he thinking was clearly skewed in certain areas. It was an interesting conversation that ended pretty well, without me knowing exactly how the intern felt about things, but I felt better.
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