I is for Identity

 




For most of my life, my identity came with titles. Daughter, wife, mother, grandmother, caregiver, LNA, worker. The list is long, honorable and exhausting. These are good roles, but somewhere along the way, I realized something unsettling: If I stripped those titles away, I wasn’t sure who I was underneath them.

When someone asks, “Tell me about yourself,” I instinctively answer with what I do, or who I belong to. I am married, I have kids, I have grandkids (Grammy- the best title ever). I work, I care for others but those answers are all attachments. They describe my relationships, not me. While I love the people and responsibilities God has entrusted to me, none of them were meant to carry the full weight of my identity.

Here’s the truth we don’t like to say out loud, roles can change. Children grow up and leave. Grandchildren don’t need you to have cookies in the house forever. Jobs end, bodies fail and if my identity is rooted only in what I do for or am to others, I’m left feeling lost when those needs look different or disappear all together.

I am learning, slowly and sometimes stubbornly, that my identity isn’t something I have earned by being useful. Before I was a wife, mother or grandmother, or employee, I was God’s. I was known, fully and completely. On my best days and my messiest ones, I know I am still a child of God. I am not loved for any of my titles or how I manage life, I am loved because God loved me first.

“See what great love the father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are.” ~ 1 John 3:1

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