Who you are
Who tells you who you are?
As an adult, I enjoy running and am passionate about exercise. As a teen I should have probably been on the track team… but I wasn’t. I wasn’t because I let other people define who I was. I was very short (OK, I still am) and thin and didn’t look like an athlete so, as far back as I can remember, I was discouraged from participating in sports. (If my family had lived near a gymnastics studio this whole story might have taken a different turn.) I remember the first person who shattered that image for me. I was at a church camp and a group of volunteer counselors were being shown the ropes course. The camp director invited me to try it out and commented that I looked like a good athlete. What? A possibility I’d never considered before. Now, I’m not deluding myself. At my height, I would have never been Olympic track material. But, I imagine I could have done fine on my high school track team. Fortunately, I don’t think my absence from youthful sporting events was significant enough to have changed my life.
So, who tells you who you are? How have you allowed others to define you? I’ve met people whose lives are a sorrowful litany of “coulda, shoulda, woulda”s. Dreams and passions they never pursued because it didn’t fit with how others had defined them. It didn’t fit the expectation of others. You need look no further than the popularity of Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” to realize how many people have been suppressed and oppressed by allowing others to define them.
We do it to ourselves and we do it to others.
I remember a church that had a single mother with three teenage sons. The oldest had gotten himself into a lot of trouble; big, serious trouble. And I remember church folk talking about the younger two boys. They assumed their fate would be the same. “That’s just the way things go,” they said… And they did.
In the church, when we baptize people, they are defined in a very particular way: as God’s beloved sons and daughters. That seems to me to be about the best – and most liberating – label we could ever put on someone.
Who tells you who you are? God does. And as Henri Nouwen says, “in God’s eyes… all we are is pure gift.”
traceyleslie 