Identity Reflection
by Skillie Jacques Botha It’s that time of the year again, when you get the time (hopefully) to do a bit of reflection of the 12 months that just passed. Questions like ‘what have I done?’, ‘what would I’ve liked to do, but couldn’t manage to?’, ‘did I create something?’, ‘what impact did I make in my community?’ — just to mention a few. It’s very important to ask all these kind of questions to help you grow as a person, but as a follower of Jesus, there’s a question that stands out above the rest and it’s actually one that we shouldn’t just be asking to ourselves once a year. It’s the question of — ‘What is my identity and where do I find my identity?’. We live in a world where everyone constantly wants us to perform and be better and do more stuff. It is here where the radical-ness of Jesus comes in. He brings us an identity where these things aren’t the most important things in our lives. A man/woman will simply never be able to find his/her identity within the things he/she does or doesn’t do. As followers of Jesus we find our identity not in what other say or think about us, but in that what God say about us. When he created us, His words describing us were: ‘very good’. Later in scripture He uses words and phrases like — ‘forgiven’ and ‘clothed in grace’ — even ‘salt of the earth’. These are amazing things to be known for or to have as our basic identity traits. “Before God tells us what to do, He tells us who we are.’ — Dave Lomas You’ll be asking met then — ‘but how do I get this identity?’. Quick answer — you can’t do anything at all. You already have it. Henri Nouwen wrote a pretty radical sentence regarding this: "From the moment we claim the truth of being the Beloved, we are faced with the call to become who we are.” In short this means, that as followers of Christ, we don’t need to becoming something through doing something — we need to become who we are through our identity in Jesus. That is pretty amazing! So as we reflect the past 12 months this time — just add the question above to all your other questions and see how they relate. Through doing this we’ll find that Jesus is and should be saturated in every single aspect of our lives. We are part of His story. He calls us His ‘beloved’ and oh how He loves us — let that be a central part in your identity.