“Who am I?” is a question I frequently asked myself through the years. It was my question when my daughter died at birth, a time when I had hoped life was coming together with a predictable plan. It was my question when I struggled with sin and vulnerabilities, knowing God was distantly out-there, but who was I in relationship with Him? Did I even have a relationship with Him, or were there big “No Trespassing” signs directed at me? The inward ache longed to know the answer to that question, but the answer evaded me. I asked “Who am I?” when we began our first pastorate in the Columbia, SC, area, and I asked it again when our pastorate started in southern California. The answers – I am a wife. I am a mom. I am a teacher. I am a pastor’s wife. – only somewhat quieted the question, but sometimes they just gave reason for the question to be more taunting. I also knew – I was a nobody – a nobody who had been broken by my own wrong choices and the wrong choices of others – and knowing the inward me seemed to contradict the outward me.
As life unfolded, I did learn I had to be real and responsive to the very pragmatic “me” that I believed I was. Pragmatic gravitates to the practical rather than the ideal. The dictionary taught me that a pragmatic person does what seems best, for the person, in the situation, with the resources available. Living out whatever “ideal” my thinking had shaped just wasn’t going to happen. The ideal pastor’s wife when we started decades ago, played the piano, sat on the front row when her husband spoke, and with her husband, greeted the congregation as they exited each Sunday morning. None of that was part of the very pragmatic “me.” However, my tendency to analyze and think rationally, allowed me to find what outwardly seemed best, and I worked at growing in those practical areas. The “Who am I?” question though still taunted. I seemed alive and responsive outwardly, but inwardly, bluntly stated, I was dead.
My deadness though still longed to be vibrant, and real, and truly alive – from the inside out. I wanted a heart that was true before God, a faith that was steadfast and unchanging. I wanted the taunting doubts to take me to God, to allow me to call Him, “Father,” to find that God would always, always meet me in my doubts, and give me truth and the ability to walk forward one day at a time, moment by moment. I wanted the glory to be God’s. I wanted a relationship with Him to be all of Him, and none of me. I wanted a heart full of love for God, and for others, and a heart that would live Jesus, speak Jesus, and teach Jesus. I wanted to find who I was in a relationship with Him. But, how????
And then, a friend listened to everything I had inwardly rehearsed for years about the inward, broken, nobody me. The pragmatic me was looking for real answers from a real God who just maybe, would love the real me. And my friend took me back to the cross and helped me understand the power and the intensity of God’s plan, and the love that was, and is, behind it. She showed me a God I had never seen before. A God who wanted to be the foundation, the anchor, the very essence of an identity that would satisfy the taunting question of the inward me. A God who wanted to be my Father and my Friend. A God who would let me shout the words from deep inside my spirit,
I am an eternally loved and forgiven child of God. That is who I am, not because of me, but all because of Him, and it cannot be taken away. That is who I am , and who God says YOU are if you call Him Father because of the cross, and you and I both are set free to live out our identity, and fulfill the potential God has for us, from the inside out.
– Bev
(Ephesians 2:1-13)
