Who are you?

Most of the time, people ask this question more tactfully, “What do you do?” Or, if in an arena providing more time, they may say, “Tell me about yourself.” But the quest remains the same: to find out who you are.

We craft elaborate answers to these three words—who are you?—and hang data from each serif on every letter. I’m a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief. I’m a mason, a mother, a machinist; a parson, a podiatrist, a philanthropist; a dancer, a debutante, a developer; a queen, a quadruplet, a Monday-morning quarterback; a general, a guru, a gypsy at heart.

And we continue to sophisticate our identities with qualifiers: I’m a doctor of dermatology, a lawyer in Louisiana, or I am Chief of the Cherokees. But while there appears to be honor in most of what we have listed thus far, there are those,  who if asked and were honest, would say, “I am nobody.”

We tend to plot our identity somewhere on a spectrum between success and failure. Acumen, accolades, and acceptance are used to determine who you are. Money and material possessions map your identity location on the success-failure spectrum. Quickly take inventory: Where do you perceive your identity to be on the spectrum?

The intriguing thing about identity is how tempting it can be to define who you are by all we have discussed and fail to consider the opinion of God, the architect of your soul. I wonder what His opinion is of who you are?

More intriguing yet, if you were to compare your perception of your identity with His perspective of you, I wonder what enlightenment it might bring to your life? Would it necessitate a paradigm shift from your definition of self to His?