Happy New Year! With the new year comes resolutions and hopes for change. Can we remake ourselves? Can a couch potato become a gym rat? Can a social media scroller become a reader? Can someone who is socially awkward become the life of the party?
How many times have you sought to re-make yourself? How successful have you been? In our new book Trading Faces, we explore this journey of identity-discovery:
As youngsters grow into teenagers and teenagers into young adults, it is more likely that roles become substitute identities. The amorphous blob of elementary children separates into distinct groups—the geeks, jocks, thespians, musicians, punks, emo kids, mean girls, preps, and church kids. What teenage movie doesn’t riff on the interplay among these groups? Despite what they say, every teen longs to embody a label. We want to be able to make sense of who we are and where we fit in this world.
I remember one summer when my parents took our family to a one-week camp in New Mexico. During the day, we divided into our respective age groups. I went off with the eleven- and twelve-year-olds. We gathered in a gazebo and introduced ourselves. As introductions began, a lightbulb went off in my head. “No one knows me here! I can be whoever I want to be.” My turn came and I introduced myself as “Johnny.” None of my friends back home called me Johnny. But maybe this was the moment to break through to a new, cooler me. I didn’t just go by a different name; I tried on a new personality. I acted tougher and more aloof. Tough-guy “Johnny” was a fraud, so at night I had to keep my family away from my new friends. I feared my parents would discover my duplicity. I was Johnny by day, John by night, slipping on the personalities like sweatshirts.
The hunt for our identity doesn’t stop as adults. We latch onto identifiers. We join Facebook pages, read books and blogs, join clubs, and make friends with those who are like-minded. We hunt for those like us. When we learn someone else has the same quirky tastes, we light up. The two of us appreciate undiscovered music and strategy board games. When we find someone similar, we think, “You’re one of us!”
And so we identify ourselves by family, marriage, vocation, political party, style, where we grew up or where we live, even by the grocery store we frequent. (Can we get an “Amen,” fellow Trader Joe’s loyalists?)
You can see where this is going, right? None of these identities is solid enough to serve as a foundation for our lives. Even if 2024 is the year you crush your financial goals or faithfully get to the gym and eat healthy, your identity won’t change. All of these things are still foundations of sand.
Not long ago, Angel and I took a work vacation to Tijuana, Mexico, in order to be intentional with our writing projects. On the beach was a stretch of homes built on the cliffs—idyllic, but not reinforced with steel and cement. Year after year, the tide has drawn the sand from the cliffs into the sea. Grain by grain, the cliffs have inched back. Some homes have already slid down the sea-worn banks. Others hang precariously over the edge with foundations exposed. It is only a matter of time until they join the fate of the other poorly anchored homes. So it is with our lives: when we’ve built our identity on what the world whispers to us about who we are rather than on the solid truths of who God declares us to be, we soon find that our exposed foundations prove to be unsupportive.
What if 2024 was the year you discovered more fully who you are in Christ? Our loving Savior invites us on a life-long journey of not only learning and loving him, but learning who we are in him. So, I pray that this is a year you discover more fully who God intends you to be and as you do, you grow in peace, joy, and hope.
You may also appreciate:
Can Discovering Ourselves Help Us Discover God?
How My Backpack Points Me Back to God
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash