Identity: A Personal Reflection
As a wife, mom, aunt, sister, daughter, friend, children’s minister, sheep farmer and boundary pushing enthusiast, I wear several hats at once on any given day. Some of those hats can be heavier than others and the weight of all of them is too much for me most of the time. Lately I have noticed that I struggle just figuring out which one I am supposed to wear, what order some of them go on my head or if I am really qualified at all to even own the hat. The enemy has a way of sneaking in and laying down confusion like a tornado in the dark. You can only see it when the lightning flashes, but you can feel its effects all around you.
A little of my backstory is required for my journey to make sense. See, I am an adoptive mother of four beautiful children. All of them are unique, wonderful and frustrating in their own way. We have had them since the oldest was 6 and the youngest was 2. My oldest son recently shared that he wanted to pursue meeting his biological family. I know that there are a thousand different opinions on what everyone would do but for this moment we are going to use what I actually did. I explained that before he met them I would really like him to read parts of his case file. This file contained details of my children’s case from the very first time CPS was called until they were placed in our home with the intent of adoption. My husband and I agreed that from day one we would try to be as honest as we could with them but we would never “bad mouth” their bio family. That is what we did. We would answer their questions as they came throughout the years as honest as possible, always taking special care to not speak ill of their bio family.
As I prepared myself to prepare him to read some very real statements about the people he wished to meet I prayed that God would give me the right words to say so that he would understand that my heart was not angry in any way but it was very cautious. We sat on the couch together and I flipped through showing him the details of his case. We spoke little and the air was heavy and thick as I choked down tears rereading the horrific things my children had experienced. I was reminded that I could not in any way understand his curiosity. I still don’t know what I would do in his shoes.
I asked him, trying to understand, why he wanted to meet them so badly. He explained that he needed to understand why he was the way he was. (Like many teens and young adults, he had struggled with making poor decisions) My heart broke. How had I failed so miserably to show him who his identity was in? I swallowed the lump in my throat and looked him in the eyes. “ Your identity is not in those people who made you. Your identity is not in your dad and I who have raised you. Your identity is in Christ.” I was screaming those words in my heart as I spoke them. How could he not know this? I followed with a reassurance that I wasn’t mad at him for wanting to meet them, I was terrified. All of the horrible things that he had just read was the only thing I knew about them. He’s 20 and didn’t want his dad or I to accompany him. I was scared to death. But he went anyway and the only explanation for what happened next is God.
His job requires that he travel and be away from home for weeks and sometimes months at a time. Over the next few weeks I began to see changes in him. He texted more and asked for advice (and actually took it). Our prayers were answered. The bright joy filled kid from years ago seemed to be peeking through those dark brown eyes of my 20 year old son.
Now remember the tornado I mentioned before, well lightning struck and that twister landed in my lap on a Sunday morning right in the middle of check in. That same 20 year old had made another poor decision and the fall out was making landfall at church on a Sunday morning 15 minutes before I was scheduled to lead 40 plus kids in their large group lesson. All of the questions were racing through my mind so fast I couldn’t even separate them. Why here? Why at my job during the worst time ever? How could he be so stupid? What was he thinking? What were people going to say about him? What were they going to say about me? Luckily I have an amazing team of volunteers that quickly caught on that I was not in a place to lead anything and they jumped in and never missed a beat.
As I sat with my head in my hands crying, I heard a whisper. “Your identity is not in your kid and it is not in the decisions he makes, it is in Me.”
Two things we are really good at is giving other people the power for the decisions we make in our life especially when they are not our best decisions and we are exceptional at giving really great advice that we are not willing to take ourselves.
I, like so many others, am relearning the lesson of what it truly means for my identity to be in Christ. To truly understand who our identity is, we have to know who He is and if our identity is in Christ then He is in us.
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
1 John 3: 1-2