I am not who I am

“…but rather think of yourself with sober judgment…”
Ro 12: 3

Do we continue fighting against our inherent weaknesses or simply give up since we haven’t achieved a lot of success doing it so far? Surely we cannot accept ourselves as who we are, because who we are really is not what we ought to be. If we think that we have arrived at our final destination, we will not launch another journey.

“Please come to watch this video presentation with me on Wednesday at our school,” Kathy pleaded more than once.

“Well, just a bunch of old ideas wrapped in a new package,” I replied rather sarcastically.

“I am sure you can learn something new from it. You won’t have anything to give to other people unless you take something in from time to time,” she insisted.

“I don’t want to go.”

I am sure the program that my wife mentioned might have a lot to offer to me, and I will easily become stagnant if I don’t learn something new everyday, but my intellectual pride somehow keeps me from reaching out and gleaning new insight from other people. I have already accepted what I am as who I am and what I have become as who I will always be.

“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Gaining new knowledge through life-long learning is not as vital to us as building ourselves up in love through much loving. I still have a lot more to improve as a person of charity than I do as a person of learning, and resigning myself to the reality that I am just who I am is entirely unacceptable.

“I am what I will be.” I should keep this as my motto.

Isn’t this exactly the way the Lord views each one of us? Aren’t we all diamonds in the rough in our Heavenly Father’s eyes? If this isn’t so, why does he continue to cut and chisel this rough stone of ours and will not cease until he gets to the core to carve out diamonds and to look for gold.

To see who we truly are is to get extremely disheartened and discouraged, but to envision what we shall become is to be comforted and encouraged. Why should I give up on myself if the Lord keeps on holding onto me? Why should I give up hope on myself if the Lord remains so hopeful of me?

“You should give up smoking cigarettes,” I told a new convert who was evidently a heavy smoker, for I could tell by his nicotine-stained teeth.

“I have tried before,” he responded.

What he needed to do was to quit viewing himself as a smoker. He as a person should not be defined by what he has been doing for so many years. What he needs to do so desperately is to restore the image of God that was placed in him when he was created. We are not made to be druggies or addicts of any substance or pornography; we are rather created to be like our Father in heaven, holy and righteous.

“That’s it,” signed the husband who was holding his wife’s head up as his son was trying to pump oxygen into her dying mother’s mouth. I struggled to find words to say to ease the tension and soften the blow of death in that gloomy hospital room, but ended up saying nothing at all. What could I have said to comfort the middle-aged man who had just lost his wife of twenty years and to two boys whose mother wouldn’t be there for them henceforth, at their graduations and weddings, to rejoice with them in their joy and to suffer with them in their sorrow?

Surely the body that had been tormented by disease for years wasn’t what she was meant to be nor would be. The deceased has become something that we can only imagine and envision by faith, and what she is is far more glorious that what she was.

That’s what brings us hope. We are not who we are; we are who we shall be. So we continue waging war against ourselves, against what we are, to achieve what we really are.