"Self-Identity"

Thursday, April 10, 2014

For a long time, I've disliked the term "find yourself" and all of the soul-searching epic journey mess that comes along with it.  I believe that your "self" is not something you find but something you build.

This puts a lot of my identity as a person of faith in a harsher perspective than I'd like.  The reason I chose St. Martha as a confirmation saint despite about twenty-five people explaining to me that she's "the bad one in that story" (which is a whole other can of worms I'm not going to open tonight), is that I am very good at sitting at God's feet.  I am very good at soul searching.  I rattle off these posts on a daily basis thinking through theological beauties.

I lose track of my mind during prayer, of course, I'm not saying I'm particularly great at it, but my problem is getting up and serving everyone dinner and making sure that I am putting my faith into action and work.

Because just sitting or traveling to find yourself is easy compared to doing the daily work of building who you are.  The process of looking for yourself should, in my opinion, be this: spread out all the things that you do on a daily basis, the people you see most often, the things that you fill your days and time with.  Don't look at your opinions or thoughts or the things of your deepest heart -- just the meta data.

If you don't like that story, find concrete things to do or change to be the person you want to be.  Or if you don't know that part, just invest in the good and eliminate the bad to make room for better until you like the shape your life is starting to take.

I can say and believe and even think all the right things to be a person of faith, but except for my actual job, I worry about how the building blocks of my life spread out.  A person of faith who spends an absurd amount of time just sitting and watching TV.  Who groans at the thought of church however happy she knows she will be when she goes.  Who skips Bible study because the week caught up with her -- in the meta data that's just choosing all the secular events of Tuesday and Wednesday over time to study an unfamiliar part of the Bible.

I listened to a report on NPR basically challenging the NSA etc.'s reassurance that they only look at the meta-data, not the content.  The content is where all the rationalization and justification and self-deception happens.  The meta-data is harder to fool.  Each little piece might not mean much, but put them all together, and you have the real picture of who you are.

Something we should all take a moment to look into.  It's also the easiest way to look at who you are with an eye to fixing it.  There are concrete things that you can change in that picture.