Bringing your Potential to Light
Reading time: <1 minutes
I follow other people because they can share an encouraging perspective on God that I might not see immediately. This week, instead of reading something new from me, I recommend you check out these resources:
https://faithandfitness.net/identity-defined-at-cedar-pointe-fitness
Brad Bloom’s Faith & Fitness Magazine
Reading time: 1 minutes
Are you at odds with how your life is going? If you are feeling more disappointment than energy for life, you could benefit from pausing to examine your direction.
You can make peace with your life even when you are experiencing frequent discouragement. Disappointment can show up in a lot of ways:
All of these can impact your sense of your identity, or who you are. Loss, stress, rejection, isolation are serious enough to cause a person to enter into self-doubt. When you start doubting your identity, you open yourself up to all kinds of trouble.
My life work for the past three years has been to study, write about, and teach the significance of knowing your identity.
Your identity comes from God and is secure with God. To know yourself as God made you is to know more about God. Share on XI focus so much on identity because knowing who I really am provides the reassurance I need. Without reassurance, life’s disappointments would overwhelm me.
How are you doing? Maybe you are finally prepared to make a course-correction. Would you like some help to assess your current place in life? Start with the guest post I wrote on Lori Schumacher’s blog. Then, if you have any questions, comment below so we can discuss how to find the positive and make peace with your life, even when a lot of negative is happening.
Or, if you want even more help with discovering your identity, consider my books Confident Identity and To Identity and Beyond.
Image by Foundry Co from Pixabay
Reading time: 3 minutes
Identity can’t be defined by what you do. It’s the other way around: what you do flows out of who you are.
The two are correlated though. What you do provides clues about who you are. But you are always more than what you do. And, in the case of a mistake, one moment in life doesn’t have the power to immortalize you.
What do you helps you discover your identity, but it doesn’t create or define your identity.
At the moment you came into existence, you have your identity. It serves as a map like your DNA. Life experiences are like sonar waves going out to detect your identity. Even what you do can be like identifying waves. Sometimes those waves contain distortions and you might get the wrong impression of who you are.
Your self-image is your best estimate of who you are. Your self-image is a limited, distorted version of your true identity. You limp along in life to some degree because you don’t know what it’s like to be completely free from the distortions. You can’t know, at least not in this life.
You can change your self-image to move into alignment with your identity. But your identity is fixed and unchanging for all time. That should be reassuring. You’re not aiming for at a moving target. You can become more aware of who you are.
Your identity is defined by your creator. If you want to know who you are, you need to ask God. So in this sense, who you are is somewhat of a mystery. Only God knows your identity completely.
Some people try to wrest control of their identity from their creator. “I’ll define myself my own way apart from God. I’ll manipulate my physical appearance, my body, and maybe even my DNA.” But this is only a superficial change compared to the identity God created for you.
You can observe your identity by looking at how you react to life experiences. You can also define it based on the truth found in the Bible. For example:
And there are many other defining statements in the Bible. Some of the definitions apply to everyone (everyone is made in God’s image), and some apply only to those who have become believers in Jesus Christ (Christians have a renewed spiritual connection with God and experience His love in a more intimate way – see 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Romans 5:5).
Then there are the specifics that only apply to each individual. You are unique. No one else has the same combination of abilities and perspective on life. You see God in a way that others need to hear. Your voice and contributions are needed – otherwise, God wouldn’t have bothered to create you. You are significant.
To define the specifics, you can look at your:
When you start to notice the patterns in all of these, you will have a stronger sense of your identity.
As you seek your identity, remember that you aren’t self-sustaining. You can’t keep yourself alive forever. You have a distorted self-image. You need to look beyond yourself to find your identity. You are defined by your context; God is where you came from, and if you’re a believer, God is where you will return.
How are you doing with discovering your true identity? What struggles or obstacles are preventing you from realizing all God made you to be?
I posted this answer on Quora for the questions: Is our identity defined by what we do? If not, what is it defined by? If you like my answer, upvote it on Quora.
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
Reading time: 2 minutes
What might you have in common with Spider-Man’s enemy, Sandman? Sandman had a broken heart and then through a freak accident, his body became broken too. If you haven’t seen Spider-Man 3 from 2007, catch a clip showing the birth of Sandman if it is still available.
Watching Sandman pull himself together will tug at your heart. He is sad and beat down by the difficulties of life. But sitting in the pieces of his life, he becomes aware of his reason to live.
When you have a mess of challenges to overcome, life can feel sad and slow. You might be saying to yourself, life can’t get any worse. But then it does.
You might feel like you're falling apart. Don't give up. God is making you whole. There is a power at work within the members of your body. Share on Xand what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places,
Ephesian 1:19-20
Life has a way of pulling you apart at the seams. However, even if you feel completely disintegrated, God is always working to make you new. You don’t have to pull yourself together, although, you have no choice but to wait as God stitches you together.
Even when you feel weak and are spread thin, God’s power is at work. God knows where every part is. He
When is God going to do this in your life? He’s doing it now. The first step to wholeness is to take inventory of how you feel spread into little pieces. You must feel the pieces
In what ways is your life in pieces? Visualize this
Now, see the pieces coming together. What do you see
No matter how broken you started, or how excruciatingly slow it seems God is working, God is making you whole. You are valuable to God and by His presence you are whole.
Christ is risen! And if you died with Him, so shall you also be raised with Him (Romans 6:5).
Image by Kuradomova from Pixabay
Reading time: 2 minutes
Your feelings are part of the complete package God provided. You have a body with five senses. You have feelings and you have thoughts.
There isn’t anything wrong with your feelings. But you might be interpreting or emphasizing them the wrong way.
Your feelings provide information just like your senses. If something smells bad, you use this information to help you make a decision. Problems can arise if you bias the information to favor the decision you want to make. You’re no longer treating the information as objective.
Some foods smell bad, but are actually good for you. If you overly value smell, you might miss out. Some food have a strange texture, but smell and taste good. If texture is important to you, then you might not eat them.
When I was a child, I had some bad food experiences with brownies and roasted pumpkin seeds (on separate occasions). Sometimes I feel queasy before I eat these foods. But unless all brownies make you sick, I need to work on my bias against them.
God made your feelings. So they must be important. They are meant to work in partnership with your other senses. Then, through your ability to discern fact from fiction, you can correctly interpret and use all the input you’ve gathered to make a godly decision.
Life becomes interesting when strong feelings come into conflict with the truth. Which one is right to prioritize? Is what you think of as the truth, really not true? Or, are your feelings off because of some bad experiences? What is the truth? Where is the deception? Isn’t this what Adam and Eve faced (see Genesis 3).
I’ll continue this discussion over the next several weeks. In the meantime, you could reflect on how much importance you place on your feelings. Have you ever been sure of something, only to find out you were wrong about it? Why was that?
Reading time: 1 minutes
If ten people see a car accident, all ten of them will have a different eye-witness report.
If five people interpret a Bible verse, all five of them will have a different opinion of its meaning.
A husband and a wife will have very different ways to recall the same event.
Why are there so many different perspectives?
Most of the time people interpret life based on their investment. By investment, I mean their convictions—their worldview. A person who has been bitten by a dog will make an investment to avoid dogs. Or maybe they will focus on finding a cure for angry dogs. A parent whose child experiences a serious injury because of a malfunctioning car seat will all of a sudden become interested in how car seats need improving. Or perhaps in an extreme case, they will refuse to let their child ride in a car.
One way to find out what someone really believes is to witness them in a heated argument. The more agitated a person becomes, the more likely they will bypass their filter and speak their raw truth. Their words may or may not be accurate, but how the person feels will come across much clearer.
If (or maybe I should say when) you’re struggling to communicate with another person, the first step should be to gain understanding. Why do they not want a dog? Why do they insist on paying extra for premium safety features? When you understand a person’s investment, you’re well on your way to negotiating a solution to your heated argument.
