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Last Christmas I received a surprise gift.
I definitely didn’t write a thank-you note.
The week before December 25 I was besieged by a series of odd sensations on the left side of my torso. For a few days my stomach, side, and ribs felt prickly. Then they felt achy. Then it seemed as if invisible lightning bolts, following no rhyme or reason, had started landing direct hits on that part of my anatomy.
I assumed these neurological annoyances would level off and go away. Instead, they got worse. By the time we had processed the last shred of discarded Christmas wrapping paper and begun to think about New Year’s resolutions, sleep had become a trial. Stabbing pains kept me awake.
What in the world was going on?
My doctor had the answer. I was under assault by shingles. Wait a minute, I protested. I had gotten vaccinated for shingles a few years earlier. Shouldn’t that have done the trick? That’s when I learned that the vaccine, while generally effective, doesn’t necessarily prevent occasional flareups.
The good news is that I never developed the infamous shingles rash and blisters. The bad news is that the intermittent flashes of pain, which were impossible to predict, still managed to make life miserable.
I had long known that the shingles virus – a hangover from my childhood bout with chicken box – was lying dormant in my body. I rarely thought about it. For some reason I assumed I would be in the lucky group of older adults who would never have to face an outbreak.
What I experienced last December was a viral sneak attack. Out of the blue it dawned on me that shingles was not going to give me a pass.
There are other things lurking inside of me that I rarely think about. They’re also ready to pounce with seemingly no warning.
There are certain fictions, for example, that I’m tempted to believe about my own life. The Catholic devotional writer Henri Nouwen noted that a handful of dangerous ideas are festering inside every one of us. They’ve become like background noise in our stream of consciousness – seemingly so much a part of normal life that we hardly notice them anymore.
But they’re capable of bringing us to our knees by means of spiritual sneak attacks we never see coming. Nouwen called them the Five Lies of Identity.
Who am I?
I am what I have.
If that’s true, what happens if I fail to wrap my hands around the best things in life? What happens if my best friend gets a car, takes a vacation, or lands a job that can never be mine? And what happens when all of my stuff inevitably begins to slip through my fingers?
I am what I do.
This is one of those unyielding lies at the heart of our show-me-your-resume culture. If I buy into it, then losing my health or mobility, or experiencing the end of my career, can feel devastating. Who am I now?
I am what other people say or think of me.
Believing the verdicts of co-workers, neighbors, or social media followers – even those who have pledged their love to me – is to risk surrendering my identity to people who cannot possibly know the depths of who I really am. It’s worth bringing to mind an old saying:
In my 20s, I worried what other people think about me.
In my 30s, I stopped caring what other people think about me.
In my 40s, I realized no one was thinking about me.
I might add that in my 70s, I’ve discovered that I can’t always remember the names of the people I used to believe were thinking about me.
I am nothing more than my worst moment.
If so, then I will be tortured all my life by my biggest blunder. I may have made a grievous mistake. But that doesn’t mean that I myself am a grievous mistake.
I am nothing less than my best moment.
At the other end of the spectrum, I am not the highlight reel of my life that’s posted on social media.
If all of us are incapable of accurately discerning our own value, and must never grant other people the power to define our lives, how can we know our true identity? St. Francis of Assisi said it well: “I am who I am in the sight of God. Nothing more, nothing less.”
How do we know who we are in the sight of God?
If you have entrusted your life to Christ, Romans 8 says that you are forgiven, and free from condemnation (vs. 1,2); that all things in your life are working together for good (v. 28); and that you cannot be separated from God’s love (vs.37-39). God says in Philippians that he is going to finish what he has started in your life (1:6).
In one jaw-dropping text (Ephesians 1:3-14), which is actually a single run-on sentence in the original Greek, the apostle Paul declares that all those who have abandoned themselves to Jesus have been blessed, chosen, predestined, spiritually adopted, redeemed, forgiven, included in God’s family, and sealed by the Holy Spirit. “Predestined” means that God knew you and loved you even before you were you.
All of this has nothing to do with how you feel right now. It has everything to do with what God says about you right now.
Spiritual growth is the process of gradually replacing the broken ideas that can dominate our minds with the Real Story about God, the world, and our own lives.
And that means recognizing that the Five Lies of Identity are always lurking in the background. They’re like a virus waiting to pounce – life-wrecking notions that are hoping our next season of discouragement, depression, or self-doubt will give them an opening for a sneak attack.
Five weeks after the onset of my battle with shingles, things finally calmed down. The virus is once again dormant.
My struggle with the Lies of Identity, unfortunately, will no doubt last a lot longer than five weeks.
But God has made it clear that he’s in the corner of anyone who yearns to say, “I am who I am in the sight of God. Nothing more, nothing less.”