I have changed so much this year that I can hardly recognize myself.
But have I really changed, or am I just walking freely in the identity I was meant to walk in?
Back in high school, I felt timid and fearful. On the outside, I seemed loud and crazy, but on the inside, I felt like everything I was doing I was doing for the approval of others, because I feared rejection. I felt like I didn’t know truly who I was because I was so worried about being who everyone else wanted me to be. Because of this, I had always thought of myself as weak. I never knew what to think and I didn’t know how to stand firm.
My senior year of high school during a discussion, my english teacher was describing people in our class by personality traits they possessed. Jake was wise, Joe was joyful, and when she got to me, she said I was strong.
At this point, I had felt at my weakest. I felt like I had no friends and no true understanding of anything in the world, and I did not understand how she could see me as strong when I was so confused about so many things. I actually felt offended that she would say that. How she could claim to know me and say that I was strong when every other day I would be crying in a different teacher’s classroom because I felt so overwhelmed and lost.
However, overtime these words have begun to resonate with me more. In college, I began taking on leadership roles, and I started to see what my english teacher was talking about. I was strong in my passions. I would hold on to the things that I loved and fight for them. I would never give up on something I believed in and I would work hard at the tasks I was given. However, people around me made me feel weak. Whenever I would shift my focus to what others thought of me, I would start to get shaky. I’d find myself flip flopping again to please people, and losing myself all over again. And whenever I failed at something, I felt like that failure was all people could see in me, and I made my failures my identity. Whenever I put my identity in the wrong places was when I felt the weakest.
This year, the Lord has been teaching me what it means to find my identity in Him. I mean, I knew that was a good thing to do before. It sounds great to say ‘It doesn’t matter what others think. It only matter what God thinks’, but at the end of the day, you really do care what people think. You don’t want them to think badly of you because you are trying to be a reflection of Christ, and they think badly of you, that’s not a great representation of Christ. But it’s all about putting the focus in the right place. If we are truly trying to seek the Lord, His love will naturally overflow out of us, and we will be molded more and more into the character of Christ when we turn to scripture to guide our lives. Then, if someone thinks something badly of us, if we are truly living according to scripture and according to God’s will in our life, it won’t matter what people think of us. We can’t please everyone, so we should seek to please the right people first.
The Lord has spoken strength over me for years, and it took me a long time to believe it, I just had to get rid of the other things that I made my identity that were not how God saw me. In Uganda, a man told me that God doesn’t see us for how we are, He sees us for how He created us, and that will never change. Even when I don’t feel strong, that is who He created me to be and that will always be true, I just have to keep seeking Him to find our true identity in Him, and as I keep chasing after Him I will become more and more of who I truly am in Christ.
