Who Am I?
Have you ever lain awake at night, wondering Who am I? Have you ever felt as if you were faking your life? That you were living someone else’s life, and you’re not sure whose? Maybe there has been some terrible mix-up and you picked another person’s life by mistake? Maybe you want to give yourself to God, but what self are you going to give?
The work life that doesn’t even come close to fully representing who you are?
What you look like on the outside, or how you appear to others?
Although you may feel differently, your roles as wife, mother, and friend are not the sum of your total identity. So what do we surrender to God? Or more accurately, whom do we surrender?
The answer is: all of the above.
The simile that seems to fit best about our “personhood” is that we are like onions. We can’t merely peel away all the layers, because the layers are us too. You don’t get to the middle of an onion to find an apple core. The onion begins at the core, and each and every layer builds upon the “onion-ness” inside. An authentic life comes from an authentic self in which the layers on the outside are merely expressions of the core on the inside. So all the roles we play tell us something, but they are not the deepest level of our identity.
So all of it is what we surrender to God. We bring all that we know of ourselves to all that we know of God, and we enter a relationship like none other. Even when we can’t figure out if all the pieces even add up to a whole person, we bring them and offer them. Then, in the loving way only God can, he begins to help us make sense of the pieces.