you

"The real you is on the side of God, against the false self." -John Eldredge

Who are you, really?  It is a question I have asked myself all my life.  When I was in twelfth grade I wrote a poem as an assignment in Creative Writing class.  I drew as a title "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?"  In the process of writing this, I had an epiphany.  This question had been the declaration of my life, and up to that point I was oblivious to it.  As I began to look deep within, the words came, line on line, about the identity I thought was stolen from me because of the tragic and early death of my father when I was four years old.  It was a poem from that four year old's perspective about the flowers being pulled from his father's coffin, and the hole (grave) the coffin was lowered into.  The last line was, "What happens to us now, Mommy?  Do we go in that hole, too?"

I always felt gyped at having the man who's DNA I carry stripped away from my life.  I bore resentment toward God, even though He was gracious enough, I know it now, to replace him with a man with faults of his own, but who loved God with a passion, and who ultimately loved and raised two children not his own as though they were.  I felt utterly alone all my adolescent years because I was unwilling to accept the full answer to my question could ever come from anyone else but my biological father.  The reason for such strong feelings is tied to the close relationship we had shared.  For many months after the accident I would tell my mother to drive the car off the Causeway bridge as we rode between our house and New Orleans, so that I could die and go see my Daddy.  It was twenty years before I could emerge from that metaphoric hole.

Those were turbulent years, growing up, that culminated in my looking for the answer to that question by exploring spiritual taboos and a rather debauchic lifestyle.  My false self led me to some dark places.  But God was there all the time, preserving my life amid my own foolishness and the devilry I dabbled in.  He placed people in some very strategic places who would gently remind me of my real self, speaking His truth into my troubled soul.  Somehow, that amount of faith, that God gives every person, began to take root and grow in me, though it has had a rough time of it.

There is the "you" that was born of the earth because of the union of your mother and father.  I knew my mother's family, of dutch-irish descent; strong roots that reach back to the Burkes of New York, and farther to the north of Ireland.  I have recently discovered that my father's family migrated from England to South Carolina, then all across the deep South to Mississippi and Louisiana.  They were mostly farmers, strong stock.  But it was not enough.  It did not answer the deeper questions.

No matter your ancestry, there is the "you" that God created, wove together in your mother's womb.  The earth "you" is of the earth, finite, born ultimately to die.  The real "you" is in the image of God, His artful expression on the canvas of the universe.  It is the place in us where God placed eternity.  The real "you" is what God meant by your existence.  Your personality, abilities, and uniqueness was conceived in God's mind.  As every snowflake is completely unique in design, there has never been, nor will there ever be another "you."

After forty-two years of living, I am well along the path of realizing the answer to my question.  I know the false self looks for the answer in the things that tether us to the earth and the finite-ancestry, finances, social status, education, etc.  But the real "you" is elevated, in a place beyond these temporal things.  That path begins with knowing where you really come from and Whose you really are.  It starts with an epiphany and a confession that ingnites a relationship with the Lord of eternity.  As you walk with Him, He whispers the answer little by little.  As you listen, the false self is exposed and overthrown, little by little.  We cannot understand it all while on this earth, for we see as through a glass, dimly.  But when we see Him, we will know completely and we will live and be, fully and finally, who we really are.