Who Are You?
Who are you?
Good question.
Most people have asked this question from one time to another and many have embarked on a personal quest to answer it. For many of us, whilst the question is a good one, the answer often proves to be a little elusive. It seems close but it often ends up being just beyond our grasp.
Who are you?
It is a critical question. It is critical because who you are, or who you think you are, affects everything you do. If you think you are a failure, you will accept nothing more. If you think you are a legend, you will accept nothing less than adulation. Slow down long enough and you will realise the way you understand who you are shapes almost everything you do.
Your identity is the lens through which you view and engage with your world.
Who are you?
It’s a question you don’t get to answer in a vacuum. There are many competing voices which actively work to shape the way you see yourself – some are outside you and others are inside you. Sometimes the voices can be so loud and discordant we can find ourselves crying out,
“I can’t think with all this noise.”
There are the voices of marketers who teach you how to buy your way to an ideal self. There is your own shame which regularly tells you that you will never be good enough - you are a failure and there is no way out. For some there is the voice of pride which overconfidently assures you of unparalleled success. It overstates your successes and insulates you from further growth. Then there are the voices of other people. Some have powerful opinions which they throw around liberally, others are powerful because you care too much about what they think and weigh their opinions too heavily.
Who are you?
If you want to know who you are then you need to go back to the beginning.
You could start with your natural family. This is a powerful place to begin finding out who you are. Consider the meaning of your family name, spend some time looking at your family tree, find out some more details about your grandparents and why your parents do what they do. From genetics to family culture, there is no doubt, your family leaves an indelible mark on you. But if you want to know who you are, you will need to go deeper, and look back further.
Who are you?
Consider for a moment the origin of humanity. If we can nail down humanity’s starting point, we will be in a position to locate who we are collectively and individually. Consider for a moment the dysfunctional connection between origin and identity in naturalistic evolution. According to this view you are not the amazing creation of an intelligent being, you are merely the product of random mutations of physical matter - atoms, molecules, and DNA. That’s it. There is no ultimate purpose, meaning, or significance in being human, other than the survival of the fittest. In this view, we are animals and we shouldn’t be surprised to see people act like it. Whilst this belief system is common, one doesn’t have to look too hard to see the fracture lines it creates for humanity - people don’t do very well in an identity vacuum. We quickly grasp for it or work to create our own meaning and purpose, but in the process we can easily lose our way and become anything.
The Bible teaches something starkly different when it comes to your identity. It teaches you that you were made in the image of another (Genesis 1:27), you were made to reflect someone glorious – God himself.
When it comes to identity, this is critical. You were made a mirror of sorts, made to be close to and reflect someone greater than yourself.
But humanity abandoned Him. We curved in on ourselves and turned our imaging towards ourselves, towards creation. Our turn away from God dehumanised us. We were not ourselves anymore, only a decrepit, run-down version. We still retained some of the family likeness (Genesis 9:6), but it was less, far less than God intended. Without God’s intervention, we would have been without Him and without hope (Ephesians 2:12). But he has done the work we couldn’t do to reunite us to himself and help us to see his glory in order to live out our created identity as imagers of God.