How Your Identity Helps You See Mine

I’m back from maternity leave, and boy, what a maternity leave it was. 

I stepped back right at the beginning of this whole pandemic and clearly the world did not stop and wait for me. While I snuggled one of the cutest little boys that you could ever hope to see things kept changing hard and fast in our world. It’s left me with more than a little bit of whiplash, and maybe you too.

There’s a lot to sift through, and in almost all the debates I’ve come across I think the best answers lie in hammering out a new middle way together. It’s a lot of work, and it’s all been pretty exhausting for me. Maybe you too. I feel like the whole world has turned into “Captain America Civil War“ which my least favorite Marvel movie because everyone is fighting, even among people who should be allies, and it just hurts my heart. I just want everyone to get along.

And so, when I got back to work and opened up my content calendar and saw that I had scheduled the month of July for content about identity I chuckled to myself. You all are probably getting tired of hearing about all the ways that God has shown up for me specifically in the plans we made together for this year, but he did it again. In the midst of all this uncertainty, strife, and unrest he is calling me to talk about the unchanging truth of who we are.

I wrote a lot about identity last summer. There’s some great posts on the blog with my musings from a year ago. But this year and last year are not the same for many people, me included. 

Right now, I feel like it is absolutely essential that we not only remember our own identity as children of God, but everybody else’s too. 

Even people that are wrong.

Even people that perpetrate evil.

Even people that sow insurrection and unrest.

Even people threaten peace. 

Even people that lash out in pain.

They are all children of God.

And so I think the only way that our human feebleness can grapple with that fact is to enter into life from a place of utter stability in our own identity in Christ. We can’t defend a position of weakness, which is where we find ourselves if we hang our identity solely on any one of the hundred things that are constantly in flux right now. 

In a world of crazy, or even more perhaps in world with an illusion of societal peace in this life, only God is constant.

I invite you to observe yourself this week. Notice when you feel afraid, uneasy, insignificant or insufficient. And then take a short break to breathe – before internalizing the feeling, before commenting, before lashing out.

Instead, think or say to yourself “I am a child of God.“ 

Then take another breath and, if another person is the cause of your uneasy feelings, remind yourself that they are God’s child too.

See what that does for your week.

I love ya.