ID Please?

I live in the midst of a generation who's been told all our lives that we need to find or forge or otherwise know our identity. And I've grown up in a culture that's told us to all be uniquely who we are, no matter if that offends others or looks odd. Strangely though, the result of this supposed "uniqueness" has produced a largely monotonous picture that I feel is best summed up in a friend's observation several years back (when camo was a fad for the cool kids) : "Everybody wears camo saying they're being unique," he said, "But everybody's wearing camo. That's not unique; that's just following the crowd."

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...

When People I Respect Break My Heart...

My confidence is not in people; it’s in Christ. Were it not for that, by now I probably would have been much more deeply shaken when people who are leaders in my generation give me reason to lose a measure of respect for them. However, it still grieves me deeply to see that kind of thing happen, especially with leaders who are Christians.

Lies can be powerful, but the Truth is stronger. Which is part of why I am not personally shaken in my beliefs or my stance when I see someone else believing or teaching a lie. But at the same time, witnessing that kind of thing always hits me squarely in the heart, because it grieves me to see anyone deceived themselves and/or deceiving others without knowing it.

I am currently in the middle of the third book in Ted Dekker’s Circle Trilogy, which have been my first introduction to his writings. These books are amazing and have deeply encouraged me in my own writing because of how poignantly and powerfully they display the Gospel through fiction and fantasy. Many times while reading these books, even though I haven’t finished yet, I have paused in awe as I witnessed within them something I have begun to glimpse in recent years about writing and its purpose. The ultimate purpose of writing is to communicate the truth, and fiction and fantasy provide an incredibly unique and—I believe—needed (at least to an extent) opportunity to talk about things that are real in terms of things that aren’t. Good writing will always, invariably, express at least some aspect of reality—be it human nature, a particular society or culture, whatever. But the most important thing any of it can point to is the reality of the things of God—who He is, what He has done, how He interacts with people, how He is at work in our world.

The Circle Trilogy contains a powerful and creative view of creation, the Fall, Christ’s sacrifice, and the new life we now have access to. Which is why I love them and part of why, when I found out Ted Dekker was coming out with a new sort of mini-series, I trusted him as a storyteller and expected to see the Gospel again within a different fictional premise.

He came so close.

But rather than the glory of the Good News, in the latter part of Eyes Wide Open, I instead found a painfully watered-down message posing in its place. The moment I started to realize where Dekker was going with the story, I started in shock and felt my heart tighten in a mixture of anguish and anger from the blow.

If it was only about me, I wouldn’t care this much. I learned a long time ago to “eat the meat and spit out the bones” when it comes to reading. But it’s not about me. That anguish and anger I felt? It wasn’t directed at Ted Dekker. It was directed at the subtle lies the enemy has somehow woven into our culture and which I suddenly realized Dekker had fallen prey to in some form.

Let me break away from this for a moment to give some explanation surrounding things here. In Eyes Wide Open, one of the main things Ted Dekker is confronting is self-image, which I agree with him is something that a lot of Christians struggle with. One of his main characters is a girl who is convinced she is ugly and who struggles with her external sense of image. I don’t want to act like all girls wrestle with this same issue of feeling the need to be pretty or beautiful, but I’ll admit that I, too, used to secretly lament that I felt I was fairly plain-looking and not attractive.

I haven’t believed that in years. 

What happened? Well first, I met the One who looks not on the outward appearance, but at the heart. Then, I realized just how vile and disgusting my heart was. Over the years, my sin had ravaged the thing and turned it into an icky, slimy, wretched, self-centered mess. But the same One who saw that even more clearly than I did, had already done something about it. He stepped into human flesh and lived a perfect life and died the death that alone could atone for God’s own, just wrath over the wickedness that otherwise would have forever separated me from His holiness. “He fought death, beat it, gave His life to the public,” as Flame says in the song “Joyful Noise.” He conquered sin and death and offered me new life in Him—His life.

Now my life is His, not mine. I died to my old self, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. I get to share my life with the One who gave it to me in the first place! And right around that same time when I started to truly understand who He is and who I am in Him, my feelings of insecurity slid to the back burner and then gradually started to disappear. I stopped caring about what others thought of me, because I was beginning to care more what God thought of me. And, not because of my own merit or anything I had to offer Him, He loved me. He loves me because of who He is, not who I am. He is love. And Love reached down to fight for the soul of a feeble, rebellious, selfish young girl so that He could draw her towards Himself, the only One who could right what was wrong within that soul. He performed His surgery, removing my heart of stone and transplanting His living, beating heart within my chest. It was all Him.

And where I defined my confidence and identity as coming from started to change from myself to Christ, I found I no longer had to worry about what I looked like—my physical appearance or people’s perception of me as a person—because it just didn’t matter anymore. All I really started to care about was what God thought, and because of Christ I am justified in His sight. God looks at me, and sees Jesus’ sacrifice that has washed me clean and given me access to enter before Him and to commune with Him. And at the same time, amazingly, He is aware of my sin and continues His work of sanctifying me—leading me in repentance and helping me to love and trust Him more with every step.

Returning to the book: in Eyes Wide Open, Ted Dekker presents a message that is based on a somewhat-subtle distortion of the Gospel. And I don’t think he did that on purpose in any way. The idea is rather prevalent in our “Christian” culture today, firstly, that salvation is all about us. Don’t get me wrong; it is and it isn’t. Christ did not die merely to let us feel better about things or to give us a better life, just like He didn’t die just to get us into Heaven after we die. Jesus said He came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. He also said He is the Life, and that the only way to the Father is through Him (John 14:6).

See, something crazy happens at salvation. You die to yourself so that you may truly live—experiencing Life as it was meant to be, united with God. And, according to Scripture, you find your life and your identity in the person of Jesus Christ. (I highly recommend reading Romans—Paul explains all this much better than I can!) God doesn’t step into your life to empower you to live like you want; He steps into your life to empower to live like He wants—what He created you for, which also turns out to always be what is best for us in the first place. Crazy, huh?

But see, there’s this lie that has crept into some people’s understanding of all that. It’s loosely based on parts of Scripture but not the whole—saying that because God created everything good in the beginning, we’re still basically good at the core; the good’s just been somehow clouded over by sin. Again, I recommend Romans—specifically chapter 3—for anyone wondering what the truth on the matter is. (Paul spends about half the chapter explaining why nobody is good or righteous in God’s sight apart from Christ.) This idea so many people have swallowed, though, says that our “real,” “true” self is buried deep down there somewhere, and that it’s what God sees in us and that He wants us to discover. It says that when the Bible talks about “dying to self” it’s talking about rejecting the “fake” you, the sinful one.

But it’s not. It’s dying to you, your desires, your life, your plans. That’s a hard pill to swallow, which is probably why the more palatable idea offered by the above ideology has become so popular. But when you truly die to yourself, surrendering all that you are and offering it up as a sacrifice to God (by the way, sacrifices die), that’s when you’re ready for real Life to set you free. As often as we focus on ourselves, God did not create us to live an existence that revolves around our own little lives. He made us to get caught up in something much bigger—His existence, His story, His plans. To know Him. We have to die to our own will, so that we can be set free to live in accordance with His will—which is life and peace and hope and joy…eternal Life (see John 17:3).

A side-effect of the idea that our “true” selves are good at the core is something that is voiced by one of Dekker’s characters in Chapter 20 of Eyes Wide Open: “You cannot love anything or anyone more than you love yourself and you can’t truly love yourself unless you see yourself whole. If you secretly disapprove of any part of yourself, you will secretly hate part of the one who made you.”

Love yourself…nowhere is that commanded in the entire Bible. If that was such an important component of what it means to be a Christian or to be set free to live as God wants us to, don’t you think He would have mentioned it at least once? Nope, again and again throughout Scripture love is characterized by a willingness to offer up itself, to give of itself for the sake of another. In fact, Jesus actually said that your love for your self and your own life should look like more like hatred in comparison with loving God, or else you are not His disciple. 

I know that some people have acted like certain passages imply that we're supposed to love ourselves, and if you believe that's the case, I beg you to go back and read the context of those verses. See if that's really what God is saying there. Also, keep in mind that human reasoning about what a verse says or means will always, only, invariably be that—human reasoning.

We love others because God first loved us. It’s not dependent on us or our ability. Like everything else about our lives, when we accept Christ’s gift of salvation, everything comes to rely on not us, but Him. Our identity is wrapped up in who He is—for apart from Him we can do nothing, and without Him we are worthless and without hope.

But we have Him! Because of His great love with which He loved us, Christ died to impart to us the Life that we could not live apart from Him, and He gave us Life in abundance. We get to trade in our identities—who we once were—and embrace who we are in Him—redeemed, rescued, restored, made alive to God in Christ, bearing His Spirit whose fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24). “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

It’s obvious that Ted Dekker is addressing some major issues with Eyes Wide Open—identity being one of them. For that, I do respect him. I don’t want it to seem like I suddenly hate him or think he has terrible motives; I don’t. But like all of us, he is human and capable of being deceived. My prayer is that he would see the infinite beauty and know the peace that comes with the truth that our identities are not to be based on anything outside of Christ. It’s not up to us to do anything but believe and rely on Him. When we do that, we embark on the most glorious adventure of all: the life we were made for, a life spent knowing Him, more and more.

And the more you get to know Him, the more you get to know the person He created you to be. For that person cannot exist without Him, and will grow to look more like Him every day. 

{Philippians 3:7-16}

“My identity is found in Christ. Any other identity will self-destruct.” -Lecrae 

When Writing Becomes an Act of Worship

Two and a half years ago, God asked me to give up something. At the time, I wasn't sure if He meant put it on hold for a while, or actually give it up forever. All I knew was that He was asking me to trust Him and to entrust what had become one of the defining aspects of my life into His hands. This exchange took place early on in the summer of 2010, during my time at Ellerslie LeadershipTraining. I had come to Ellerslie with as clear of an idea for what my future held as I'd had up to that point, with several specific things God had highlighted that I felt He was calling me in. Among those things was writing. And it was special to me. 

See, a few years before that was when, through one comment from my Dad, I first began to realize I had any talent for writing at all. During the remainder of my time in high school, I began to branch out and write more than just school assignments and journal entries. I embarked on writing stories, and about a year before Ellerslie came around, I had written the first draft of a book meant to call my generation to rise up and live out what we say we believe. I felt strongly that God had led me to write it, and reasoned that therefore I was supposed to pursue self-publishing it once I had opportunity, which wasn't likely to happen before my time at Ellerslie was over. In addition to this completed draft, I had several stories in-progress I had been working on.

But then, when I least expected it, God asked me to give it all up. He wanted my gaze on Him, and though at the time I could not understand why He was asking this of me, I knew I needed to trust Him. The summer of 2020 was life-changing for me in more ways than I can probably come close to describing, but in the area of writing it was also pivotal. What I could not see then, when a large part of my identity was wrapped up in "what I could do for God," was that surrender was to be the avenue to something greater than I'd ever dreamed. God was drawing me to a life of worship--of adoration and communion with Him, not just part-time, but constantly. 

Surrender is not a one-time event. It means a constant, repeated act of choosing to yield to another's will. The beauty of true surrender to Christ lies in its continuation and the way God uses it for His glory. 

For me, I went through a season that summer where I literally could not write. It wasn't that I felt I shouldn't; it was that I tried over and over again, and found my attempts clumsy and inadequate. Part of it was that I was encountering things I had no words for, no way to adequately describe. In fact, that was probably a larger part of it than I realized at the time. But the reality, for me, was that for a time my ability was stripped away from me. And during that time, rather than collapsing into hopelessness, I found myself further enraptured by my God, by who He is and what He was doing in and through and around me, and lost sight of me and my own abilities. I became more satisfied in Christ than I had ever been before, and found that He truly was enough, even if everything else in my life was taken away. 

Toward the end of the summer, God surprised me by giving it back. We had an "assignment" of sorts, to write or compose something, some sort of remembrance, of what we had seen God doing during our eleven weeks of Basic Training. And as I sorted through the many things that had taken place in my own soul and those around me during that ridiculously short amount of time (for it seemed like so much longer, considering all that happened), inspiration struck. I found myself writing in a way I never had before, not just with the way I was trying to use an analogy to describe something, but with the sense of worship that accompanied it.

I had prayed during the writing process of that first-draft book I finished the year before, but by now something had changed within my soul. It wasn't just that I enjoyed writing more now that I had walked through a season without it. Something had changed, and suddenly writing became an act of worship. 

Two and a half years later, I am still in the process of discovering what it means for writing to be a form of worship. See, worship isn't just singing songs on a Sunday morning. It's more than a feeling that fades with the situation. Worship is a spiritual posture of surrender and trust and reliance and sweet fellowship with the God who created us to know Him. And it's meant to characterize every aspect of our day-to-day lives. If those in heaven are constantly worshiping the Lord (see Revelation 4:8-11), then "on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10) looks the same, doesn't it? "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen. I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" (Rom. 11:36-12:1). It's the beautiful, indescribable, joyous surrender and communion with our Creator that we were designed for. 

And recently, quite possibly more than ever before in my life, I have been experiencing times spent writing that are indeed simultaneously times of worship. I'm no longer writing for myself, out of simply a desire to create a story. It's not about trying to write something that will merely entertain people anymore. During a recent car ride on the way home from visiting relatives up North, I typed out just under two-and-a-half pages (which may just turn into a later blog post) about how I now perceive writing and why I write. 

But in the end, it's not about the writing or even what it produces. It's not even about the impact or effect it could have on others. Ultimately, it's about the worship, because that is what I was created for. Not stringing groups of words together on paper so that they make sense or prove some point. Not eloquence or lack thereof. Worship. 

Because we were created to live and thrive in a constant state of worship, of prayer, of communion with God. So "worship" may look different at different times. One moment, it may be singing to the Lord, and the next, it may look like loving the person next to you the way that God loves them. Sometimes it looks like picking up trash, and sometimes it looks like having a conversation with a close friend or a complete stranger. Sometimes it looks like getting alone with God, and sometimes it looks like sharing the Gospel. Sometimes it means painful sacrifice, and sometimes it means crying tears of astonishment when you see what God is doing or has done. Sometimes it looks like being completely still and silent and reflecting on God, or waiting on Him, listening. Simply put, worship means living in the center of God's will, every moment. Seeking Him, seeing Him, knowing Him more with each passing day. Sometimes, it even looks like sleeping--peacefully resting in His promises while you lose consciousness for a time...

And sometimes, it looks like writing.

. . .