My sixteen year old son asked me a troubling question.
“Mom, what sort of person am I?”
Huh?
Well that was totally unexpected. As a parent, I take very seriously my responsibility to affirm the uniqueness and God-given talents in each of my children. I knew my son wasn’t asking me about his gifts. He was asking about his core. When it is all peeled away, who is he? The teen years are so fraught with self-doubt and uncertainty, that it is often hard to navigate the discordant and competing voices that speak to a child’s heart. We had a long conversation, but I remember telling him that ultimately, it is a dangerous thing to ask others to evaluate our core. Even well meaning people (such as parents) can get it wrong. We do our best to examine personality, gifting, interests and hobbies, and on the basis of what we observe (or are allowed to observe) we offer our opinion of others.This is a deeply flawed process.
I have never told the young people I interact with or my own children to be themselves. I understand the sentiment. In a fraudulent, mask-wearing world, be yourself seems like a radical call to authenticity. But frankly, I find it trite, average and well…misleading. The truth is, most of us do not know who we truly are. Beneath the layers of self-doubt, fear of failure, social ills (such racism and poverty) and the confines of our own narrow experiences, who we truly are often remains buried under a rumble of dysfunction and sin.
How many people who have been told that they would never_________________ (insert ambitious goal) had life changing encounters that defied the damning sentence of their evaluators. Side note, I believe with all my heart that if a teacher hadn’t told a young Malcolm Little that as a black man he did not have it in him to become a lawyer, the man now known as Malcolm X would have been the greatest civil rights attorney in our nation’s history. A racist, hateful evaluation of this gifted young man’s aspirations forever altered the course of his life. Today, we have social media tossed in the toxic brew of confusion. Young people have sought to find their identity and purpose from the loudest voices in the media and the refuge of social media communities. The fact is only our Creator, our Father God, truly knows who we truly are at the core. Some might accuse me of being disingenuous here. Isn’t religion another form of group orthodoxy that defines us in unhelpful ways?
Yes.
Religion does that.
But I am talking about a relationship with the Living God that gives His word “to build you up and give you an inheritance among the saints.” I am talking about a God who looked at a guy hiding behind a bush because he doesn’t want to be seen by a group of bullies, and God greets him as, “A mighty man of valor.” Or a God who sees a kid looking after sheep and decides he has the heart to be a nation’s greatest king. Or a God who sees a dirt poor immigrant woman who lost everything and makes her the great grandmother of Israel’s greatest king. Or a God who takes a group of fishermen and trains them to be the standard bearers of the faith. Or a God who takes a terrorist and makes him the greatest apostle of the New Testament. And perhaps most scandalously of all, a God who takes a fallen woman and makes her the great, great grandmother of the Messiah. A God who sees our core, who goes beneath the layers of our pathologies and says, “This is who you really are.”
Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do men say I am?”
Nearly all of them got it wrong. Peter, by revelation of God, nailed it. We will not know who we truly are if we rely on the opinion of men or our polluted ideas about authenticity. God has never replicated a single human. We are The Designer’s Original with surprising gifts, talents, aptitudes, dispositions and purpose that will remain buried unless we come to Him. In fact, He says we are actually part-takers of His divine nature.
Forget about being yourself.
He told us we are like Him.
Find out what that means.