Ooh nah nah, what’s my name?

Simple question, right?  Why, I’m Jill Lauren Jones.  [Or Joy or Joe or John or Jelly or J depending on which African you ask – no one can pronounce my name here.  Thanks mom and dad.]
 
But what’s my name? 

I recently watched a Rob Bell Nooma video called “Name.”  In it, Bell talks about the story of Jacob wrestling with a man in Genesis 32.  Jacob declares that he won’t let go until the man gives him a blessing, so the man asks “What is your name?”  But in ancient times, name was equivalent to one’s identity, so really he was asking “Who are you?”  How much of our pain in life comes from not really knowing how to answer that question?

The World Race has been filled with lots of lessons and a ton of growth so far, but the biggest thing I’ve been trying to work through is figuring out who I am.  You see, I’ve spent most of my life letting other people define who I am, sometimes for the better and at other times for the worse.  I’ve let the expectations of my family, friends, teachers, coaches, and leaders set the standard for how I live my life.  I’ve put my worth and value in the labels that other people have given me.  I’ve let the world tell me who I am.  At worst, I’ve let the enemy whisper in my ear confirmations that I am the person I never wanted to become. 

One of the lowest points of this race for me came at the end of Nepal.  The past couple of months had been a battle for many different reasons, and I had come to this point of wanting to give up.  I felt beaten and bruised, like I had no fight left in me, like I was face down in the mud.  I was a mess, and I was heartbroken because my reality had become all the lies that I had been told about who Jill Jones was.  I remember meeting with one of my squad leaders, and he pulled out a piece of paper and pen, and pushed it across the table to me.  At the top of the paper he wrote my name, and below that he wrote “Who does the world say I am?”  I sat there and painfully wrote down all the lies I had bought into over the years.  From there, we went through the entire list and sought after the truth of who I really was.  He flipped over the piece of paper and wrote “What’s my name?”  And on that side he told me to write down who the Lord said that I was.  As quickly as I had written the labels given to me by my peers, I struggled through trying to figure out the identity that God intended for me to have.  I sat staring at the empty page for a while.  And then I bawled.  Right there in a Nepalese coffee shop in front of a whole lot of strangers.  Slowly the truth started to break through the muck of the lies, and made its way from the depths of my heart to the purple ink and notebook paper before me.  It was difficult, it was awkward, but it was freeing.

I’ve been wanting to write this blog for a while, because I’ve found that nothing makes me angrier than the people I love being told lies about themselves.  I find it so heartbreaking when people choose to take on the labels that the world has given them, instead of their heavenly identity (and I’ll admit that I’m probably the worst about doing this).  But I’m sick of people feeling shame or embarrassment or guilt or depression because they believe that they are defined by what others think of them or how much they weigh or how strong they are or what their IQ is or how many times they’ve messed up or how big those mistakes have been.  I’m so sick of the chains that the enemy puts on us when he gets us to believe that these things matter.  I’m tired of all the lies we believe about who God made when he made each of us.  I want to be free.  I want to live in the confidence of who God says that I am.  I want to own the identity that Christ gives me.  I want to stand before the world and declare that when God made Jill Jones, this is who He created.