Alphabet of Love - I is for Identity

According to Merriam-Webster online dictionary identity is the distinguishing character or personality of an individual. It is what sets us apart from everyone else as a unique person with unrepeatable mixture of qualities, gifts, abilities and idiosyncrasies.  There was never in the history anyone quite like you or quite like me, nor there ever will be again.  What an astounding truth! What is even more amazing is how hard we try to be like someone else or to ‘become’ unique.  We don’t need to try – we already are!

Identity assumes continuity and sameness of qualities in a person over time and under different circumstances.  This can present a challenge in an unstable, changing world where who we are is defined by our nationality, our job or our cultural heritage.  When I moved to the United States, I had to wrestle with these issues on several different levels.  I lost the job that I loved, and I got a job that I hated.  People started assuming things about me based on the job that I was doing that wasn’t me.  I was extracted from the intricate network of family and friend relationships where people knew who I was and who I wasn’t, and placed in the relational context where rules, values and expected behaviors were vastly different from what I was used to. In the course of time, the country I used to belong to splintered and I found myself stranded as a resident alien, in a twilight zone of stateless people without a country and without citizenship. Simultaneously, I also morphed from Miss to Mrs, to Mrs. Mom.  Few years into the metamorphosis, my new boss dismissed me and my role on the team as not mission critical and another soon afterwards commented that I used to be somebody. I figured I was on my own. 

Who am I? I kept asking myself and God over and over again.

Who do You say that I am?!!!  The answer was far from being clear for months and years that followed. 

During that time I realized that there is a continuity in me that transcends the continents that I reside on.  There is a continuity in me that goes beyond my day job and whether my boss thinks I am mission critical or not.  There is a continuity in me beyond being a wife and a mother, neighbor and friend, beyond the citizenship and the culture.  All these have affected me on some profound level and made me the person that I am today, but there is me that is known, and loved, and nurtured beyond any human relationship I ever had or will ever have. 

Years ago, as a self-aware (or so I thought!) confident atheist, I was told that there is God who knows me better than I know myself and that our core identity is rooted in our relationship with Him.  To this day, I am re-discovering the astounding depths of this truth.  It is not who you or anyone else say that I am.  It is not even who I say that I am.  It is who He says that I am that truly, really, ultimately matters. In comparison to that, everything else, significant and important as it may be, is just a shadow, a husk, a vapor in the wind.

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:10