Who are you, really?

I find the things in life that hurt the most are often the things that challenge my identity in some way.

When I make a trivial mistake like proverbially tripping over my words, or maybe literally tripping over my two feet, it doesn’t cut very deep. But when I make a mistake that challenges the parts of my identity that I take pride in, it tends to hurt very much—like when I provide pastoral advice but communicate it so poorly that it ends up having the opposite effect of what is intended. Since I hope to be an effective and faithful pastor, when I don’t measure up to that goal, it hurts. When we as people strive to be a good spouse/parent/employee/whatever, and something happens that shatters our perception of ourselves, we tend to feel a tremendous amount of pain.

If we remember that nothing can shatter our true identity as being a beloved child of God, the Lord enables us to begin to live out that identity. Instead of covering up our faults, we are free to confess them and make restitution where necessary.

Time and again, however, I have witnessed people draw strength, courage and comfort from the timeless truth that our primary identity is that we are beloved children of almighty God. When we remember we never did anything to earn our salvation—and that when we fail, or others fail us, it does nothing to separate us from God’s love—we can begin to face whatever we need to face in the way that God wants us to face it.

If we need to face our own failures but want to maintain some illusion around our identity as the perfect spouse/parent/employee/whatever, we may be tempted to lie about the truth of our failures, or else to distort or minimize it to try and save face. And when we face someone else’s failure that shatters our perception around something we have built our identity around (of having the perfect marriage/family, for example), we may be tempted to act out in ways that are hurtful to those who have failed instead of behaving in a more gracious and restorative manner.

However, if we remember that nothing can shatter our true identity as being a beloved child of God, the Lord enables us to begin to live out that identity. Instead of covering up our faults, we are free to confess them and make restitution where necessary. Instead of lashing out against others, we seek their well-being alongside our own, despite the fact that they hurt us.

We also are given the profound sense of eternity in our hearts that reminds us that this world is not truly our home, and “our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:17).