Encouraging Words-Who Are You?

Zephaniah 3:17: The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing" (NIV)

Hebrews 13:5: He loves us so much that, He will never leave us or forsake us. (NIV)

Who are you?

No, I’m not asking it like an inquisitive six-year old or screaming it at you with obscenities like the Who song in the 70’s.  it’s a question I’m asking because it’s one we ask ourselves many times over the course of our lives.  I believe there are three sources we use to answer this question.  Two of them often mislead us, the other never does but we often forget to ask.

The first source is other people.  This starts from our earliest memories, a parent’s warm embrace tells us we are worth loving, while not being chosen for the basketball team shows us we don’t measure up.

I’m 52 years old and I still have tapes playing in my head of events that happened to me growing up that can still stir some deep emotion.  They are mixed, times I was praised by teachers in school and loved by my mother, but also scorned by schoolmates because, well, I was kind of a dork, and berated by my mother.

As I’ve grown older, the stakes have only gotten higher.  I’ve received performance awards and pink slips at work.  I’ve been blissfully happy in marriage and been divorced.  I’ve been distanced from what’s left of my family yet felt deep love and acceptance from my ministry family. 

The one thing that is consistent throughout is the inconsistency of people.  The best example that comes to mind from my life was the gushing praise I received from the Treasurer where I worked, only to have him turn around and get me fired a few months later.  Oh yes, that was at a church where I was a member—try and wrap your arms around THAT mixed message.  If we gauge our value as a person from what others think of us, we’ll only succeed in twisting ourselves up into an emotional knot and waste a lot of energy trying to untie it throughout our lives.

The second source is ourselves.  One of the lessons I learned from my mother was how to be really, really hard on myself.  This charming trait has made it very difficult for me to really enjoy the satisfaction of doing something well (“you could have tried harder Junior”) or to relax and enjoy doing nothing at all (“why are you wasting time when there’s work to be done?”).

Unfortunately, I know other people who have the opposite problem.  They have accepted as fact that they don’t have any special skills or gifts and just plod along in life.  They settle for mediocre jobs, mediocre relationships, and mediocre if any faith because they just don’t think they deserve or can attain anything better.

For those of you my age or older, you have probably heard the quote from the old “Pogo” cartoon strip where he said “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”  He meant “ours.” But that twisted cliché can carry so much truth in our lives.  We can set up filters so think around our brains and hearts that anything positive and encouraging someone says or event that happens to us can be negative.  Big bonus at work-“Look at all those taxes they take out.”  Interest from someone you would like to date-“Boy, they must be desperate to give me a second look.” 

Okay, now to the encouraging part.  The best source of answering the question “Who are you?” comes from our Lord and Savior.  You are a child of the Most High God!  So maybe you came from a poor or dysfunctional family (didn’t we all?).  Maybe you didn’t get high SAT scores and couldn’t hit a baseball sitting on a tee.  That is all secondary to the fact that you are a child of God! 

You are not an accident.  You are not worthless.  You are not unloved.  Many of us have heard some or all of those words from people who deeply hurt us, but in the grand scheme of things those words are lies!  Our heavenly father created us and has a plan to prosper us and give us hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11).  Our Lord, who cannot lie, tells us throughout His word, from Genesis to Revelation, how much He loves us and what value we have in His eyes.  In light of this, does it really matter if our knucklehead boss doesn’t like us if our Lord loves us?  The correct answer is no.

So at the end of the day, who do we believe?  Do we take our parents’ word for it despite the emotional scars they accumulated before we ever came on the scene?  Do we accept the verdict of our schoolmates who are struggling with their own self-esteem issues?  Do we buy the verdict of our employers who may be pursuing their own agenda at our expense?  Or do we accept the word of the one person who loves us perfectly, unconditionally, and eternally?  Personally, I’ll go with the latter choice and encourage you to remember to do the same.

That’s the hard part, isn’t it?  We can sooooo easily get caught up in the constant flurry of activity in our lives that we just get swept away and lose focus on the only person NOT demanding anything from us.  Isn’t that ironic, as I find so many things are about God.  The one who could demand everything from us doesn’t.  He waits patiently with open arms for us to seek Him out.

It’s in those arms that we can truly find out who we are and be who our creator intended for us be.  Let’s make time to spend there this week.