Who Am I?

“By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God”

                                                                                                                                                                                      Ephesians 2:8

The theologian and philosopher Dr. Jim Denison from Dallas is a critical thinker whom I enjoy reading greatly. Today’s comments had me reminiscing – and sadly recognizing a critical gap in my thinking, and the thinking of many others. The question: Who am I? What is my identity and what is it based on?

For me several years ago, I realized that my identity was confused over many different levels, and I had to fight hard to keep up. If my identity was based on being a family physician – that was good, right? – it was critical for me to provide excellent care and to be respected and loved by my patients. If my identity was based on being a perfect husband, father, grandfather then I failed over and over because….oh, because of too many identities!

I believe that I share my identity crisis with almost all the world. In a time of moral relativism, folks get to choose their current identities based on their own metrics and goals. How has that worked out? It hasn’t. Some feel that many of our highest level of elected leaders – Congress, the administrations, etc. – suffer from this very identity crisis. They’ve been there so long that their identities are no longer as servants of their constituencies, but being recognized as, well, whatever they’ve been for 40 years!

Dr. Denison writes, “As a wise mentor once told me, the difference between Christianity and every other worldview can be summarized by this simple formula: Do vs. done. If we focus on what we do, we’re never done. We have to keep doing it with no assurance that we’ve ever done enough. If we focus on what Christ has done, however, there’s nothing we must do.”

In my book, In a Mirror Dimly, I recounted the story of a lunch get-together with a group of brothers in Christ back in Shreveport. We usually met at the same table at the same restaurant, and there we other groups who gathered there at the same time. One day a gentleman from an adjoining table stopped me as I was leaving and told me, in his very words, that our group, “really pissed us off!” I asked why! He told me that with all that was going on in the world, with violence and wars and pandemic (it was in the very early days of COVID), how could we be joyful and upbeat? It only took me a few seconds to remember the old Paul Harvey radio spot, “The Rest of the Story.” That’s it. We know the rest of the story. It’s so easy to become identified with television/radio news and talking heads that we forget who we really are. We are all, each one of us, made in the image of God, and for those of us who believe, we are children of the living God adopted into His Kingdom.

Even I can’t fail at that!!