"Who am I?"

Journal Entry July 31, 2001

A question everyone asks themselves is "who am I?" So we seek out the answer in the everyday situation of our lives. but what we find is conformity and generality. As Os Guinness says, "we become prisoners of our category, be it gender, class, race, generation, or ancestry. Our individuality is ignored." But who is it ignored by, society or ourselves? In my opinion, I believe it to be ourselves, which may have been caused by society. None the less, today as a whole we try to be like others, like the movie stars, like sports stars, music stars, or just the popular people on campus. We are afraid to let the unique side out, out of fear of rejection by others. But what we realize is that we aren't being fair to ourselves, and we soon grow very tired of being someone we're not.

So seeking out who we truly are. There is only one place to go, to the very being who created us, God! He of course carefully designed us to have all the traits we have in order for us to bring glory to Him. He has called us for a certain life and with that life comes situations that need specific traits to work it out. So having a unique call on our lives, hence needing certain traits to accommodate the call; only when we respond to the call and take action do we come to grasp our unique traits.
"Only when we respond to Christ and follow His call do we become our real selves and come to have personalities of our own." -Os Guinness

" The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' our of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become."
-C.S. Lewis


But seeing as we are human and fail to complete the work of God in us, although He still uses it to bring Him glory, we will never know completely who we are. But is that all bad? No, for we need God all the more to motivate and direct us. For as Os Guinness says, "Modern people have things completely back to front: Professing to be unsure of God, they pretend to be sure of themselves. Followers of Christ put things the other way around: Unsure of ourselves, we are sure of God." So when seeking 'self,' seek your calling, seek God. For He is the only true answer to such a question. Never conform out of fear, be proud of individualism, seek it out!"

"Do you want to know the secret of the mystery of your very being and rise to become what you were born to be? Listen to Jesus of Nazareth, answer His call." -OS Guinness