Ah, the ultimate question. And after doing a quick internet search for my name, I found an answer:

According to profileengine.com, I am a person of “no measurable influence.”

What I found amusing about this discovery is a.) how happy I look sitting there next to a pronouncement of my irrelevance  and b.) the option Profile Engine gives me to “Claim this profile.”   Uh, no thanks.

Well, of course, it has absolutely no meaning whatsoever, and of course, I am someone who matters. Yet there was a stinging truth to those words “no measurable influence” that shot deep into my core. A pinched nerve of identity. It was sharp but gone quickly, and I recovered honestly, with a chuckle, and proceeded with my day in a matter of seconds. I even showed it to my husband and had another laugh, but it left me wondering what caused the pain in the first place.

The pain came from the fact that, in many ways, I feel like Profile Engine’s summary is pretty accurate, and yet I want to be remarkable. Desperately.

As a kid, I learned I could be special with work. I worked really hard in school. Then, I graduated and worked really hard to get a job at my dream organization, and after a few more years, I finally got a job in the exact department I had wanted to be in before I graduated. All along the way, I had supportive voices that told me I could really make something of myself. Right when I was finally starting to get some solid credits to my name in my work, I left the job last month. So, who am I?

I’ve tried to answer that question by defining myself with other roles in my life: motherhood, community member, wife, daughter, runner, owner of rescued dogs, etc…

But the question remains like an itch on the roof of my mouth: if who I am is what I do, then who am I when I stop doing things? Does a little bit of me disappear if I remove any of the categories above? Or worse, have them taken from me?

Everything ultimately stops. Even if I never chose to leave work, eventually, I would have to retire. Even though I am a wife, daughter, mother & friend, what makes those roles active are the presence of my husband, child, parents, and community. While we pray and hope we don’t lose anyone, we all know it is inevitable. Some of you may be grieving the loss right now, or the pain rushes back far too quickly from a loss years ago. The anchors we tie our identity to are not heavy enough to hold the weight of our souls.

Are we having fun yet? I know this blog is, thus far, kind of a bummer. I am going to turn it around here (although some of you may not find much comfort in my conclusion at first glance).

Henri J.M. Nouwen described the identity quest we all journey out on perfectly, “At issue here is the question: ‘To whom do I belong? To God or to the world?’ Many of my daily preoccupations suggest that I belong more to the world than to God. A little criticism makes me angry, and a little rejection makes me depressed. A little praise raises my spirits, and a little success excites me. It takes very little to raise me up or thrust me down. Often, I am like a small boat on the ocean, completely at the mercy of its waves. All the time and energy I spend in keeping some kind of balance and preventing myself from being tipped over and drowning shows that my life is mostly a struggle for survival: not a holy struggle, but an anxious struggle resulting from the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me.”

“The world that defines me” or in other words, “Claim this profile.” Some days that feels like a great deal; things are looking up, and prospects are good. Then circumstances change, and we must press on, tired but cautiously optimistic that we will arrive one day and feel like we succeeded. Then we can rest.

What if our quest could end here without all the cold nights in the wilderness of an identity dictated by life’s uncertainties? What if we could dismount from our long ride of finding our worth and live out of the comfort of being a child of God? That would be pretty neat.

 But now you have arrived at your destination: By faith in Christ, you are in direct relationship with God~ Galatians 3:26 (MSG). 

Some of you don’t believe in God,  or at least not in God, as defined by what you’ve heard about Him from Christians you know or on TV. I don’t blame you. But for the sake of intellectual pursuit, let’s say for a minute that there is a God, and He is good. Let’s say that God came in human form and died for us because He loves us, and we get to be a part of His family by simply believing we need Him.  If there truly is a God like that, wouldn’t it be amazing? Wouldn’t connection with Him be identity enough?

We live in a culture where being an heir to fortune and wealth opens all the right doors, so being a child of the God of the universe should end the identity quest right there. Sadly, even for those of us who believe in Christ as God, that news still rarely causes us to pull back on the reins, let alone stop searching for ourselves in our circumstances.

This is getting longwinded. So, I am going to wrap this up. In closing, I will say that my intellectual theology says I am beloved by God to the point of death. Intellectually, I also know the sun is key to me staying alive. Functionally, I live like the sun has no influence beyond dictating if I have to use my treadmill. My functional theology also reveals that God’s love and my heiress status in Him means very little to me. That is tragic.

It’s time to let that sink in. It’s time to dismount from the journey of finding myself.

I hope I don’t ever bury a child. I hope (most days) I don’t outlive my husband. I hope my parents are the first to live to 200, though they probably wouldn’t be too thrilled by that concept. I hope to jump back into the workforce one day and have a sweet career. But what I want now, what I am learning through my quarter-life crisis, if I can borrow from John Mayer, is to make my intellectual theology and functional theology one. To live out of the privilege and identity of my daughterhood in God that my circumstances can’t take away. That would be rest, indeed.