Tag: who am I

The labels we wear

labels Labels.  We all wear them.  The things people have spoken about us or to us have stuck to us and changed the way we live.  For some it is trying to outlive the labels, and others try to live up to them.  Everyone of us has experienced the labels our world puts on people.

As humans we love to categorize people, and have them fit neatly into a slot that makes sense in our minds.  The standard we use for people is usually ourselves.  When people behave the way we want they are great people, and when they don’t we usually get upset.  If people behave differently enough from us we categorize them as different and set them aside.   We have labels for just about everyone we meet, and we relate to people based on the labels they have.

Growing up there were jocks and geeks, preps and Goths, punks, metal heads and grunge.  But there are more than the social labels we wear.  There are a lot of things spoken to us over the years that have labeled us as well.  Useless, bum, jerk, loser, worthless, good for nothing, dumbass, and many others.  The struggle to be yourself is especially hard for young people still discovering who they really are as they grow into adulthood.  And the labels can be extremely hard to live with as evidenced by our teen suicide rates.more than a label

We are more than a label.  And we don’t have to be the labels that others have placed on us.  Even our parents placed labels on us as we grew up and were told to be something.  Part of the journey of self discovery is learning to discern yourself from the labels.  Under all the labels our world has placed on us is the real you and I.  An extremely valuable person to find.  One that Jesus thought was worth leaving heaven and dying for.

All of those labels have created ways of relating and interacting with our world, and many of them are learned behaviors and are not the real us.  The journey is to help us decide which ones are not us and which ones are.  As we discover ourselves under the labels we can then begin to express ourselves for who we really are.  It isn’t going to be an easy path to take because some of the labels we wear have a depth of pain attached to them that will take some working through.  But the rewards for doing so are incredible.  Don’t let the worry of what you may discover keep you from searching.  There is a great wealth inside each one of us if we are willing to look for and discover who we really are.

Know God / Know Yourself

Business people standing with question mark on boards

Knowing yourself is something that usually goes overlooked in our society.  It goes overlooked more often in our churches.  For years I was taught that we deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow Jesus.  These are the words of Jesus in Matthew 16 “Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”  And I have always understood it to mean that everything I am disappears and I follow Jesus.  I know many others who have had the same understanding.  I don’t matter, and I must follow Him.

It is a wrong interpretation of the words of Jesus.  Because the goal of Christianity is for us to know God.   The Westminster Catechism states “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”  But our ability to know God hinges on our ability to know ourselves.  Thomas à Kempis argued that “a humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning,” and Augustine’s prayer was “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee.”

God desires to be known by us.  The whole of scripture is the story of God reaching out to humanity and revealing Himself to us and calling us to know Him personally and completely.  He has gone to great lengths to show His love and character for us and to invite us to come closer and know Him more.  One of the major limiting factors of this is our lack of understanding of ourselves.  When God reveals Himself to us, He also reveals us.  The goal of Christianity is for the life of Christ to be made manifest in us, or for us to be like Jesus in what we do, say and think.  We do this by knowing God and allowing Him to show us the areas of our lives that are not like Him.

Which means that we need to know ourselves, and be willing to look at the things about ourselves that we often try to ignore.  “Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.  John Calvin wrote, “Nearly the whole of sacred doctrine consists in these two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Benner, David G. (2009-09-20). The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

David Benner also wrote “Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality.”
Unfortunately this is the state that most Christians live in.  We have an appearance that we work on, especially when we are gathering with other Christians, and only we know the taugustinerue reality of the condition of our hearts.  Which is why the world objects to Christianity saying that “we are a bunch of hypocrites.”  We can deeply know God, as promised by Scripture, and we can know ourselves.  Jesus thought you and I were valuable enough to die for.  As we grow in our understanding of ourselves, and allow God to speak into our lives and show Himself the transformation will be glorious, and people can say of us as they did Peter and John “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus.” Acts 4:13 NLT  The journey is never ever to late to take.

Share the journey

shapeimage_2The journey to become who we were created to be is a powerful and life changing one.  It is unfortunately one that many people miss out on taking.  They become whoever their world, situation or friendships demand, and miss completely out on the adventure they were created for.  Once you start the journey, your life begins to shift, and things that you thought were once important often begin to fade away because your filters for life have changed.

As you journey you get to see yourself and others differently, and you become more accepting of others because you are becoming more secure in who you are so when others are different they no longer cause you to be uncomfortable or threatened.  It truly is an amazing journey that all of us should be on.  The world would be a much different place to live if we did.  As we journey we write about who we are becoming and the changes we are making because we understand ourselves better when we write about it.  Our journals begin to record the milestones along the way and we understand ourselves and our environment better.

Just as important as journaling is for us to understand ourselves, is sharing your journey with someone else.  Finding someone you can be honest with, and who can be honest with you is invaluable to discovering yourself.  We can come to some understanding by writing, but it pales in comparison to the depth of understanding we gain by sharing our journey.  Finding someone you can trust openly and begin to share your struggles, insights and victories helps you to process deeply who you are and their questions and insights as you share help you discover what changes you could be making.

Someone once said You don’t truly understand something until you try to teach it to someone else. The process of sharing anything that you think you understand deepens you level of understanding because you have to take that mess of information, sort it out, repackage it and organize it in a way that someone else can understand.   By having to help someone else understand your journey you open the door to you understanding you.

When we are trying to explain something to someone else, we are forced to ask ourselves the most important question in leaning… in gaining true understanding… “why.” When we have to answer the question “why,” superficial understanding won’t do. We have to know something deeply in order to not just say how, but why.  Why we are is just as important as who we are and who we are becoming.  Only by sharing the journey with someone else can we truly and deeply understand ourselves.