Where Do You Find Yourself?
You’ve probably heard the popular advice that, to find out where your treasure is, look at how you spend your time. This advice is extremely useful; but for me, another metric is still more helpful, and it begins with a question. To find out who or what your God (or god) is, ask yourself: Where do I get my self-concept? To whom or to what do I look to tell me who I am and what I deserve?
Our world is filled with voices clamoring for our attention, and it seems they are all eager to tell us what we’re doing wrong – and how they can help us achieve happiness. Lifestyle bloggers tell us we’re lazy for not making all our own household products and buying only locally grown produce. Celebrities and CEOs tell us we’re frumpy and unexciting – that our success stories aren’t successful enough. Sometimes the messages about ourselves from outside sources are positive: our romantic partners tell us we’re beautiful and worthy of love, and our clients tell us we’re serving others well. Whether positive or negative, we can come to rely on people and platforms to shape our own ideas of who we are.
Moreover, we live in a world that likes to tell us who we are based on demographics. Once, in a college course, my professor asked each of us on the first day of class to stand up and tell everyone our race, socioeconomic status, religion, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The goal of the exercise was to get to know everyone in class on a deeper level. Yet, at the end of the activity, I found that I didn’t know any of my classmates any better – I remember thinking that I would have learned much more if we had shared our favorite books or bands. I may have come to know more about my classmates, but I didn’t get glimpses of their hearts.
When we look to outside sources or demographic information to tell us who we are, we may gain some valuable insights about ourselves that can lead down paths of meaningful self-discovery. These sources can point us in potentially fruitful directions, but they will never speak to our deepest identities.
Where shall we go, then? The answer is clear: we must go deeper. We must go to the source. The best bet for finding out about creation is to ask the creator, no?
God knows where each of us is prone to stray, seeking false or incomplete understandings of ourselves. Jesus meets us on those paths, offering us His hand, as if saying, “Let me show you who you are to me, my child.”
In the second reading last Sunday, Paul writes, “I have become all things to all, to save at least some” (1 Cor 9:22). Paul understood the importance of seeing others as individuals, for who they are – not going by certain traits and what those might seem to suggest. Because he saw people as they were, Paul was able to bring Jesus to them in the ways they needed.
Indeed, Jesus comes to us where we are and in the ways that will reveal to us most profoundly that, where we seek completion and receive empty promises, cultivating bitterness and envy while constructing happy façades, He offers true perfection and fulfillment.
Whether we need a best friend or a parent, a healer or a motivator, encouragement on the current path or a massive U-turn sign, Jesus knows, and He longs to be what we need Him to be, and from there to become our everything. He longs to show us who we are – the Father’s beloved children – so that we might start living in terms of this identity, not any identities projected onto us or created by our own devices. He longs to free us from any worldly ownership of our hearts and take up residence there Himself, until we live in His presence forever.
