Do you ever wake up without a sense of identity? Have you ever read in scripture a declaration God has made over you and thought “I don’t know if that’s true.” Are you surrounded by people who walk in confidence… who walk in love… and you just don’t know how to get to that place?
Justin Marshall recently asked this question on the World Race Alumni Facebook page: “If you could name one thing about your life that changed as a result of going on the World Race, what would it be?” ‘Identity’ ranked among the top and still yet, blog after blog gets posted about a Racer returning home – eager to be his new self to his family and friends – only to have lost confidence and identity.
In some ways this is surprising to me because the World Race is built on some very biblical foundations for the finding of identity. So I’d like to look to James 1, which I think contains that foundation, and further explain what I mean.
Verse 23 say this:
If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and forgets who he is the moment he walks away.
Does that sound like anything that’s happened to you? Have you ever looked in a mirror and thought “I’m a child of God!” only to step away from that mirror having forgotten your declaration?
Well, I want you to think about that word “mirror” as it relates to the World Race. I know there weren’t many mirrors out there (which might explain why it didn’t seem like a bad idea to grow out my mustache during “manistry”) but I think we as Racers may be using something else to see our reflection…
Community. Feedback. And team time.
Those three things were our mirror on the World Race – we could always trust our community to supply us with confidence and encouragement; we could trust in feedback for sharpening and strength. It wasn’t easy for the first few months but by the end we were dependent on waking up and looking to those people around us to confirm that we were children of God on a mission.
But here’s what happens:
Once the race ends and Racers go home, they lose their mirror. They lose the thing that they’ve been counting on all year for identity and are shocked to find that what James says will happen, happens. They forget who they are the moment they walk away.
Community isn’t meant to provide you with identity, ministry is.
Hear me out: Perhaps we’ve assigned a task to community that it can’t fulfill – at least not on it’s own. Let’s look at that verse in James 1 again:
“If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and forgets who he is the moment he walks away. But anyone who looks at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, he will be blessed in what he does.”
If you’re lacking a sense of identity, what does James say to do about it? He says “abide in the law of liberty, and you will be blessed.” What does that mean?
How do we abide in the law of liberty?
James answers that question in the last verse of the chapter:
Visit orphans and widows in their distress and keep oneself unstained by the world.
That’s where we really find identity – in ministry. That’s the real foundation. On the World Race ministry just happens to go hand in hand with community and that’s precisely why I think they may be getting confused. We’re accrediting the effects of ministry to community.
I don’t know that my story is the same as everyone’s but I know that when I got home from the race I was really excited to create community. I wanted to take everything I’d learned about feedback and team time and apply it to my hometown. In some way, I even pictured myself as being some sort of prophet to my hometown, sent to bring real community to everyone who didn’t have it. Well, that didn’t happen.
And when it didn’t happen the way I dreamed it would (because I spent all my time trying to make community instead of doing ministry) I started to lose all the confidence I’d gained on the race. I started to think “maybe I’m not capable of contributing to, or creating, community.”
I had approached my return to home all wrong. Community doesn’t create ministry; ministry creates community.
The reason we are losing our confidence and forgetting our identity is because our need for community isn’t met when we get home. When we no longer have the mirror we’ve been dependent on we forget who we are. So let’s place our efforts back into ministering to the homeless, to the widows, to the orphans, and to the lost. Let’s allow the Law of Liberty to be our mirror. As James says: It’s the “hearer of the Word” who will forget who they are, while it’s the “doer of the Word” who will be blessed.
