While watching Crosspoint Church’s Sunday evening online experience, Bellevue Campus Pastor, Justin Davis (@justindavis33) asked a question that I am still wrestling with as I type this.
Are you striving for something, chasing something (outside of Christ), that if you quit chasing tomorrow you wouldn’t know who you are?
It made me think…In what or whom am I placing my identity? What about you?
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6 responses to “Who am I?”
I wrestled with that when I got fired from my worship ministry at the end of 2007. I had gotten so wrapped up in being a worship minister it had become who I was even more so than a follower of Jesus. Never should anything take over the top spot of a Jesus follower. Today I am proudly a Jesus follower, a husband, a father, and finally a campus minister.
I feel ya Tom. I hope you’ll check out tomorrow’s post that shares my struggle in this area.
I feel like my identity is in the way my body looks and/or what the scale says each morning. I am completely obsessed with trying to have the perfect, thin body. I have always struggled with weight and have been very overweight most of my life. Then, I lost about 70 pounds when I got dengue while living in Puerto Rico. I did not plan to lose weight, in fact, I tried to lose weight many, many times. All of a sudden, it came off and I loved the attention I received. Now, ten years later, I am still about the same weight, but I want to lose about 30 more pounds to get to a heart-healthy weight. Over the last six months, I have become a “runner” and regular gym attender. Still, I am struggling with these pesky few pounds. I wonder what my life would be like if I wasn’t always trying to lose weight and calculate calories. I also wonder if this is an issue that a lot of people face, especially as we get older.
Totally identify with your struggle Jamie. And while I am all about being healthy, I also long to live in the recognition that I am loved for who I am in every way.
Gotta say you’ve got me thinking hard again…I really wrestled with this back in the early spring as I was wanting to make sure that I wasn’t finding my identity in my many roles, but especially as someone’s someone special. I knew that if that was the case and things weren’t going well, or fell apart for whatever reason, I would be devastated.
After I came to grips with this a bit better, we listened to a sermon by Tim Keller at a Bible study I go to…it was about hell and while it was good, it wasn’t the parts about hell that stuck with me but rather the idea that building our identity, as Christians, on anything other than God is sin….It is an addiction that will require us to constantly chase bigger and better in order to satisfy. And when God is NOT our source of identity, when hard times come and things fall apart in our lives (and that WILL happen…to some degree or another), we are completely devastated because we have lost everything rather than “simply” being badly wounded.
I gotta tell ya….it’s hard to keep my identity firmly grounded in Him. I have to daily choose to be defined by who GOD says I am and not by the roles I have or what others say about me. There is freedom in that though…HUGE freedom in allowing God to define me rather than society/others.
So I’m heading to bed tonight with that thought in my head: Am I still choosing to be defined by Him? Or have I allowed other things to sneak in and begin, once again, to define me? Time to do a little housecleaning…and redefining…
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