The elusive identity: why is fulfillment just out of reach?

Why is fulfillment just out of reach?

No one is impervious to the arrows from our Enemy. Everyone’s pain is different, but everyone’s pain is real. How should we respond to the pain of the arrows? We should respond with truth. These arrows will try to shape our identity, but we have to tell them where our identity really lies.

When an arrow struck my heart and told me I wasn’t enough, I believed it. I asked Jesus to enter my heart a few months later, but the little shack He entered was already war-ravaged. 

Identity by personality

In order to avoid the pain of rejection, I decided to do everything I could to make people like me. I couldn’t be a tomboy, but I could be likable. I would do whatever people wanted me to do and let my friends have the final say in anything we did together. I wouldn’t speak my mind but stuff my feelings deep inside where they wouldn’t offend anyone. 

The worst part is that I convinced myself that this was the “Christ-like” thing to do.

I was being selfless, right? Actually, I was selfishly being selfless just so people would like me.

It didn’t work.

Frankly, I’m just not charismatic. My personality is not warm and friendly on its own, and it didn’t help that I was scared to really love anyone because such closeness would make rejection hurt all the more.

Besides, one of my best friends had me beat in the likable personality category. After introducing her to a couple of my friends and watching them lean away from me and toward her bright smile like plants in the sun, I gave up trying to win friends with my personality. I left that to people who were really good at it. There was no point in giving the shirt off my back if nobody even noticed the person behind the shirt.

So I decided to do things to make people notice and like me. No one can overlook a smart or talented person.


Identity by performance

We carefully craft our own identities

At age eight, I started violin lessons and practiced diligently every day even when I hated it. My calluses on my fingers grew with the calluses on my heart.

At age ten, I overheard my mom telling someone I wasn’t very athletic, so I decided to change that. By age twelve, I was running regularly and spending hours practicing basketball and volleyball in a gym all by myself. I ran circles on our local ball field, chasing an identity just out of reach. As balls slammed against a hard wall in my practices, the gym echoed hollowly with the sound of my efforts.

At age twelve, I started practicing calligraphy and drawing. While my handwriting grew prettier, my words grew emptier, and while my graphite faces grew more realistic, my own face grew more ambiguous.

At age fourteen, I started memorizing vast chunks of the Bible and dramatizing them for audiences. I paced, somersaulted, and screamed truth in front of crowds for their approval. But I was unconsciously living a lie.

Who was I?

I was a violinist. I was an athlete. I was an artist. I was an actor.

This is who I was.

I carefully crafted each identity and waited for the increasing acceptance I craved.

It didn’t come. 

Still not enough

When I was fifteen, I met a boy at church camp who was muscular, dark, and gorgeous. Like my faithful puppy friend Jared of my childhood, he shadowed me for a day or two. When I tore crisp, wet lettuce and sang “By the Waters of Babylon” with other girls, he tore lettuce too. When I shot baskets in the gym for the free-throw competition, he shot baskets too. This new shadow baffled and pleased me, even if he did do flips while girls were watching.

But then my sun friend arrived, and my shadow shifted to her.

I swallowed the pain of this subtle rejection. I loved my friend and already knew my pale smiles couldn’t match hers. So I prepared to show my prowess in other ways. As I burst across the finish line at the mile race, sweat-soaked and lungs afire, I wondered if he would notice me again. I had worked hard, and I was faster than any girl who dared to race me. Surely I would never have to earn anyone’s love again. I had finished proving myself, and yet—nothing changed.

The gorgeous boy smiled at me and looked away again.

People cheered for me and then fell silent.

The hole inside gaped on.

When your identity is based on the earned opinion of others, nothing you do is enough. Smiles fade, cheers die out, and nothing is different. 

Our identity and fulfillment remain elusive because we are basing them on things that don't last.

I cried in the weeks that followed that summer camp when I was fifteen. I consoled myself with one little truth, “Jesus thinks I’m tops.”

But it was like slapping a Band-Aid on a jagged wound.

Proverbs 29:25 says, “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe.” 

This means that we shouldn’t let mankind’s opinion govern our lives. That is what I did for ten years or more. I didn’t know what it meant to throw myself completely on God. I didn’t know the peace of resting absolutely in the identity that Christ had already given me. 

Identity by performance for God

Exhausted, I closed my heart to most of the world and turned to the one Friend I knew would never reject me. Or, at least He wouldn’t reject me if I did everything right. I decided that nothing would go wrong if I strove to please God, and since I was such a “good girl,” that shouldn’t be hard.

But now I was treating God the same way I had treated the rest of my friends. I was showing off all of my tricks on the playground, hoping that He would pick me.

Our real identity

What I didn’t know is that God had already picked me. The Bible tells us that He picked us before we ever did anything right.

“God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8

God has already fashioned an identity for each of us. This identity is brilliant, exciting, and new, and we don’t have to do a thing to earn it. But it will always elude us as long as we are slaving to create “our own” identities.

The search begins: how did we get here?

Whether we’ve experienced this strange thing called “rebirth” or not, we are all searching for something. This is because something isn’t right, but we don’t know it yet.

The search takes many forms, but they are essentially the same:

· The perfect job

· The romantic relationship that feels right

· The healthiest diet or exercise regime

· A way to seem put together

· Friends

· The ideal college

· The drug that makes pain go away

These things can be good in their own right, but why do they never satisfy? 

Why do we still feel empty? 

I’ll tell you.

These things can’t fill us because they weren’t designed to fill us. Plain and simple. And yet we keep searching, trying to stuff things into this unexplainable hole that gapes painfully as though a tooth has just been extracted. 

I remember how it felt to have two adult teeth taken out of my eleven-year-old mouth. My cheeks bulged with white gauze until I drooled around it, and I couldn’t communicate anything to my mom on the car ride home because my holes were overflowing with stuff that had taken the place of my teeth. But as soon as I removed the gauze and felt the chasm with my tongue, I cringed. I had no idea that little molars had roots that deep! And so I stuffed the gauze back in, bit my tongue, and let the tears roll down my rounded cheeks, unable to say how miserable I felt. 

How did we get here? Where did this hole come from?

In a book called The Sacred Romance, John Eldredge and Brent Curtis propose that we have all been wounded. You can buy this book or look into their podcasts here:

Read The Sacred Romance

Listen to apodcast on The Sacred Romance

From this book, I realized that somewhere, sometime, somehow, an arrow has pierced our hearts. This arrow usually carries a message that we latch onto and may believe the rest of our lives until the lie is shattered. These messages say things like . . .

 

· “You don’t have what it takes.”

· “You’re not enough.”

· “You’re too much.”

· “No one could ever love you.”

· “You’re a failure.” 

· “God isn’t good.”

The arrows come at various times in many forms, but they usually come when we are young and most vulnerable. They may be huge, like a parent abusing a child, or small, like a friend making a seemingly innocent joke. But both circumstances can be an arrow with equally deep and far-reaching consequences.

I’ll tell you mine.

My Arrow

The Indian summer sun slanted brightly on that New England morning. As was often our custom on the Bible school campus where we lived, my friends and I gathered to play outside as our parents attended staff meeting—a mysterious affair where the grownups closed themselves behind curtained glass doors, reclined in stuffed chairs in an elegant parlor, and discussed the world’s problems. 

I was five years old and dreamed of being a tomboy just like my friends. Jayna and Laura were six and seven, and they climbed trees and danced on rooftops fearlessly in their bare feet. However, my shoes clung stubbornly to my feet while my limbs turned to sticky rubber as soon as I got eight feet off the ground. Still, the older girls managed to tolerate me most of the time, and Jayna’s little brother dogged my steps like a faithful puppy which I ignored. 

I don’t remember what we were playing on this particular morning. But suddenly, Jayna stomped off, her calloused feet slapping the pavement. Laura, the blond mediator between us in age and personality, followed her. I shadowed both of them cautiously, wanting to learn why Jayna was so upset. 

Jayna perched on a cement wall, arms wrapped around her legs as tight as a spring. Laura murmured words soft as little waves on a lake beach. Jayna’s answer soared over them and pierced the distance between us: “I don’t want to play with Kayla.” She said it as simply as if she didn’t want to wear green socks that day, but the arrow found its mark and buried deep.

It said, “You’re not enough.” 

Of course, I didn’t know I’d been struck by an arrow, and I didn’t understand its message. I didn’t even know what “rejection” meant. But I knew then what it felt like. It hurt. And I decided on that day that I never wanted to experience that kind of pain again. 

This decision set the course for the next sixteen years of my life. 

The First Arrow

There’s another famous decision that altered the course of human history. It happened in the Garden of Eden. We usually blame Eve for getting the human race into the mess it’s now in, but is it possible that she was also attacked by an arrow?

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1, English Standard Version). 

Here is the first arrow. It seems harmless, but what is it doing? It’s carrying a message of doubt. 

“But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” (Genesis 3:4-5)

What is the serpent implying? 

God is holding out on you. He’s not good. You could be something more. You’re not enough the way you are right now. 

Aha! Now we see the lies for what they really are! Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. But the messages did their insidious work. Eve bit the lie and swallowed it, and the human

race, whose DNA dwelt inside her, has been feasting on similar lies ever since. 

This is why we are searching. 

Ever since that day in the Garden, an essential piece of us was knocked out and we’ve been looking for that missing piece ever since. We're on the constant look-out for Eden, which is always just out of reach. We inherited this gaping hole from our parents and then the serpent gave us our own carefully crafted arrow so we would believe a lie and continue the cycle of sin that this lie perpetuates. 

The situation is really quite hopeless, except for one thing.

God hasn’t left the picture. 

And He has sent us a solution. 

Rebirth: how it changed me

My birth certificate doesn't show it, but today is my real birthday.

I used to be a lying, thieving little brat. My siblings’ treasured possessions gathered in my secret chimney corner and I pretended to know nothing about them, while I cruelly took advantage of the one friend who adored me.

But nineteen years ago today, my daddy and I had a talk about sin.

“What do you think we should do about it?” he asked.

“I guess do a lot of good things to outweigh all the bad things,” I replied logically.

But on that chilly Sunday morning, I asked Jesus to take the punishment for my crimes, then I asked Him to come into my chilly little heart and stay. I was re-born that day. And nothing has been the same since.

My problems haven’t all gone away. I may be saved, but I’ve been lost again and again, seeking acceptance in all the wrong ways and trying to please a false god that I had made up in my head because I didn't understand what the real God was like. I continued to do a lot of good things to outweigh all the bad things, living a life of self-inflicted discipline that was not real Christianity. I have used the people I cared about most and kept the rest of the world at arm’s length.

But the real God has been there every step of the way, whispering love and truth, redeeming and transforming each area of brokenness I didn’t know I had. One. Step. At a time. And He’s been waking me, waking me . . . to Life, Love, and Adventure with Him. For nineteen years.

And because a real relationship with Jesus Christ is a living thing, you are never the same for long. I’m not the same person I was nineteen years ago or five years ago or six months ago.

It’s been an unforgettable journey and worth every step.

I hope you can find the same God on your journey. Meanwhile, maybe I can tell you about mine...