Three Sticks — Personal Development for Christians

Who are you, is the first of the 4 questions for your life. The question who are you, is asking you to understand yourself independent of external influences and relationships. It is essentially asking what is left after you strip away the different roles that you fill in life, such as father, son, employee, student etc. Do you know what’s left? This can be a terrifying question for many people. This is especially true today where we often allow fickle and limited external forces to determine what is right and best for us. These forces come in nice innocuous forms like images from the media or peer pressure from our closest friends and relatives. Some of you reading now will say, hey man, you’re a Christian isn’t God just another example of an external force. My answer is that he is, but unlike many these other external forces I am describing he his neither fickle nor limited. His word is everlasting and sustains us. He wants what is best for us and allows us to find our own unique path. This is a distinct contrast from the other forces that surround us daily that want us to be just like everyone else.

In effect many of us forfeit our power by consciously or unconsciously relying on others to determine our lives. We allow this to happen because we fear our own power. We fear what Liam Neeson identifies in Batman Begins as our “power to do great and terrible things.” We know that there is safety and acceptance in being just like everyone else. We believe that to stand out too much would require us to reject the social conditioning we have undergone and force us to be who we truly are. Unfortunately most of us do not know who we are outside of the roles we fill and the societal norms that we adhere to.

If you’re like me, you have gone through periods when you desperately wanted to discover yourself. Like me, you may have been afraid of what you will find. You asked yourself will I be a coward? A liar? A betrayer? The probability is that at one time or another you were all of those things. We have all fallen short of the mark at some point in our lives. Typically our less than noble actions were born of fear. However, it is important to remember that the question Who am I? isn’t asking who you were, but who are you now? It is in the present that you have the power to define yourself. It is only in the present that you have control over your life, the past has already happened and the future is not guaranteed, but in this moment you can be whatever you want to be.

Defining who you are is one of the greatest gifts that we have been given. It is empowering and it determines the level of joy and contentment you will experience for the rest of your life. If you believe that who you are is limited by your past actions you will never become more than what you are now. Similarly if you focus on your future self instead of your present self you limit your present self to your current condition because you’ve given up your power to determine who you are in the present moment. However if you daily make the conscious choice to see yourself they way you want to be seen then you will be striving towards your idealized image of yourself. You will have created the mindset that enables you to accomplish whatever you want. You will DO because you already ARE (conjugated BE) and so you will HAVE.

Defining yourself also allows you to accept your faults and mistakes and realize that they are only temporary. You can learn from your mistakes and overcome them and their consequences rather than being limited by them or worse ignoring them so that you repeat them. Because you can relegate your mistake to the past, you are free to make your present self whatever you want to be. This liberates you from the need to beat yourself up and allows you to more easily forgive yourself.

Rather than being afraid of your power you need to embrace it and define yourself in the way that you want to be right now. In the next article, I will cover Question 2: What Do I Want?

 

 

Trackback URL for this post.