Be Who You Are.

I bought a tee shirt about 12 years ago while living in Charlotte, it says, “Be Who You Are.” I still have it somewhere tucked away in one of my closets.

Be who you are.

That’s not always easy, is it?

It seems that many folks spend their entire lives attempting to conform to an ideal of what or who they should be rather than accepting who they are.

If we are truly and uniquely created in the image of a loving God then who were are at our core is who we “should” be. When I look at Jesus’ ministry I am struck by how he attempted to help people see themselves as God saw them; how he attempted to restore people to wholeness, not by getting folks to act as they “should” but by accepting them as they were.

The idea of telling someone to “go and sin no more” is in many ways telling some one to be uniquely who God created them to be rather than to use manipulation and fear to coerce someone into thinking they have missed the mark of a “perfect should.”

Most of the addicts I have worked with, whether it is heroin, alcohol, religious, food, people-pleasing, and control are attempting to release the pressure of trying to conform to either their “should” or someone else’s. The addiction is the symptom of not being who one is. The addiction becomes the solution to the inability to conform to an “inner should”. The “should be” is a never ending quest for a false sense of perfection that often leads to more guilt and shame versus the quest for becoming who we are-- acceptance.

Perhaps the greatest sin is not that we are “bad to our core” but we have been taught that who we are is “not enough”, that we should be more. If God truly became human to restore us to wholeness—to save us, then there had to be something about humanity that God saw was fit to redeem. I am not suggesting that we don’t sin but perhaps what we call sin is not who we are but more of an issue or symptom of attempting to be something we are not. Yes we need to turn away from our sin and turn toward God for when we do we discover that God is very near to us and that we are loved at our very core.

The story of Adam and Eve, in many ways, is one where they bought the lie that they were not enough that they could have more and therefore should be more than who they were. Perhaps “original” sin is the sin that takes us away from our God-created essence and convinces us that we are less than Love’s image.

Jesus was a rebel. He rebelled against those powers, laws and forces that attempted to force people into a pattern “shoulds”. When he spoke out and acted against the “shoulds” it troubled those religious powers who knew how people “should” be. I suspect that much of the depression, and sadly suicide, results less from one’s inability to deal with who they are and more about the pressure with attempting to be something he/she is convinced he should be.

I think we do wrestle with powers and principalities; patterns of this world that tell us who God created us to be is not enough, that we should be more or something else other than who we are at our core.

Jesus did not come to earth to convince us of what we should be in the eyes of humans but to help us realize who we are in the heart of God.