We as humans tend to find our identity by comparison. Either we compare our lives to others' we respect, or we compare our lives to others' we despise in some way or another. A few bold souls actually manage to step out of the crowd and do something actually different, but in most cases their identities are so closely tied to their art or whatever other means they've become truly unique in--that an attack on their work (or whatever their identity is wrapped up in) comes through as a direct attack on their very being.
However, there's another place for our identities to be found. It's a place where we are asked to lose our identities in order to truly find them, and in truth, it's never really so much about our identities as this crazy, messed-up world tells us identity is. See, over the past eight or so years, I've been in the process of slowly losing my identity--or the identity I once assumed was mine--and embracing who I was really created to be. I wrote in my journal quite a few years back the statement "The more you get to know Me (God), the more you get to know the person I created you to be." At the time, it was an attempt at a song lyric, but even though that never panned out, the statement has stuck with me all this time.
You see, I serve a God (the God) who created me and knows every single detail of not only my life and how I operate, but how I was meant to operate--who I was meant to be. I was born broken, maimed by sin and dead in spirit. But that's not how my story was supposed to end, and I daresay that--although you and I share the same beginning--that's not how yours is supposed to end, either.
I mostly grew up thinking I was shy and nothing out of the ordinary. Mainly, shy. And ever since the day I read 2 Timothy 1:7, that wall started to completely and utterly crumble. Because if "God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind," then the shyness I so liked to hide behind, wasn't really the "God made me this way" thing I liked to claim it was. God hadn't intended me to live that way. And so, in these past seven our eight years, I have been on a journey that has partially been defined by a transition from being literally the shyest person I've ever met, to currently voluntarily placing myself in a foreign country where I'm surrounded by a language I'm still consistently stumbling my way through. And I actually wasn't that nervous when I got on the plane.
How did that happen? Well, you see, that little line in my journal however-many-years-ago has rung true all this time. The more I get to know Jesus, the more I find myself transformed by Him. It's more than Him rubbing off on me; He is in the process of forging in me what He saw when He created me. The more I know His heart, the more I want mine to look like it. And that looks different in different people, because we serve a God who delights in constructing unique lives and stories with a common theme expressed in a multitude of ways. All us Christians have one calling: to follow Christ and let His love cause us to love others and treat them as more important than ourselves. And yet, that calling looks different in different believers: some are called to other countries either temporarily or long-term, some are called to stay in their hometown all their lives, some are called to write, some to teach, some to sing, some to study, some many of these things at once. God has uniquely gifted every individual, and has a plan and a purpose for them.
Which leads me to the inspiration of this post. Some friends of mine are incredibly gifted in the areas of music scoring and video production. That, combined with a tremendous passion for and pursuit of Christ, has led to the creation of a video entitled "He Is," which is a meditation on the Names of God.
There's a reason when someone asks you for your ID, that identification has your name on it. Names are important; and the names God calls Himself in the Bible say much about His character. Because He can't lie, therefore each of these descriptions is true of Him. And He is so much vaster than any one descriptor can pin down for our finite minds. We can't grasp the fullness of who He is. Not in this life. And it is the grandest of all adventures to follow Him on a path of getting to know exactly who He is in deeper ways day after day.
All that being said, please give "He Is" a view and a listen, and allow yourself and your identity to shrink into a tiny, forgotten speck before the grandeur that is our God. Because He is...
