Can we choose our identity?
Daniel Day Lewis is known as one of the most committed method actors of our time. When he takes on a role, he embodies the character not only on camera but off camera, and he only responds to his character’s name. For the movie In the Name of the Father, Day-Lewis lost fifty pounds and spent three days in solitary confinement without water. For his role as a man with cerebral palsy who could only use his left foot, Day Lewis lived like the character off-set, getting carried or wheelchaired, and was hand-fed all his meals. During the filming of Gangs of New York, which was set in nineteenth-century New York, Day-Lewis caught pneumonia because he insisted on wearing period-specific clothing. He then refused to take modern medicine and almost died as a result.
“That is crazy!” we exclaim. And yet, many of us have spent our lives embodying roles that are not our true identities. We have lost track of what ultimate reality is.
Humans have been wearing emotional masks since we exited the garden of Eden. We try on identities, attempting to discover one where we find affirmation, peace, and security. We put on masks of vocation, role, and achievement, hoping to find the contentment we desperately long for.
No matter how many masks we put on, happiness eludes us. Rates of depression and suicide have never been higher. Marriages fail at alarming rates. More individuals in the United States have substance addictions than those who have cancer.2 The happiness our masks promise remains out of reach for most.
How then can we find happiness? How can we be at peace? We believe the answer is found in two words: true identity.
But how do we discover our identity? Is it something we can choose?
I could be literally anything
Recently we were listening to a podcast with an influential leader. She gushed about her mom: “When I was little, she never stopped telling me I could be literally anything.” There is something beautiful in that encouragement. And her statement contains a seed of truth. For many of us, our identities formed with this sense of un- bounded possibility. There was nothing we couldn’t do if we put our minds to it.
And yet, almost anyone outside of a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Western context would find this sort of un- bridled encouragement completely befuddling. The idea of having boundless vocational options—or any options, for that matter—is a peculiarly modern and Western notion.
We are told that we are defined by our independence. If we have a birthright as Americans, it is our freedom. We are told it is the most important commodity we possess. We are free to do what we want, be what we want, love who we want.
We don’t want to be hemmed in or controlled. The idea of growing up as most in the history of the world have—with a predetermined vocation and spouse—makes us scoff. No one could possibly live like that.
Our hearts tell us we will be happy if we have more options, but radical freedom actually has the opposite effect. Surprisingly, psychological research tells us that increased choice diminishes our happiness. A child without a bedtime, nutritional guardrails, or discipline is not only ill behaved but anxious and unhappy.
Spirituality Is Our Sacred Space
In the modern West, our freedom extends beyond our ability to choose our vocation and spouse. We have the freedom to create our own spirituality. We believe that the spiritual world is a private world, a place we can craft to our own liking. The sacred is personal. The personal is sacred.
The notion that our spirituality is located in a private place between us and our experience of the divine is a relatively new idea. It is also a rare point of agreement between those who are ideologically on opposite sides of the spectrum. It seems we all can agree that no one should dictate another person’s religious beliefs.
For some, the true north on their compass is their conception of love. For the other side, the true north is their conception of truth. But for both, their spiritual lives are their own. It’s no surprise that church attendance has so dramatically dipped in the past decade. For everything we in the West fight over, we appear to agree on one thing: no institution will define our spirituality. Our spiritual life is ours, and whatever beliefs we craft in that deeply personal space are unimpeachable.
We think we are creating a meaningful path. Yet many have a haunting sense that they are lost in these spiritual woods. If our compass comes from within, how do we know it is directing us somewhere that actually exists? Where is our destination? And how do we know we will get there?
Star of the Show
There are a lot of conversations today about building your platform and your brand. Many claim the job title of “influencer” or “social media influencer.” There is something attractive about wielding influence. “What could I do with fame?” we ponder. “What impact could I have?”
You can pour your energy into building your own kingdom. But what will last of it? Who will remember you? What are you living for?
Most of us live our lives longing for our five minutes of fame (how about seven for me, God?), yearning to be discovered, hoping our YouTube video goes viral. In our heart of hearts, many of us want the world to revolve around us. We want our lives to be on a big- ger stage. It’s why there is a business of selling followers on social media. We want a bigger audience, even if it’s an audience of fake people. A 2017 survey showed that millennials value fame highly. Thirty percent would prefer to be famous rather than to be a lawyer; 23 percent would choose fame over being a doctor; and 8 percent would cut off ties to their family in exchange for fame.
How foolish of us! Can you tell me the names of any of your great-great-grandparents? Can you tell me one thing they did in their lives? Friend, from a human perspective, we will all be forgotten. Poet Henry Austin Dobson once wrote, “Fame is a food that dead men eat.”
The irony is that when we pursue our own glory and platform, we are living in true enslavement. The apostle Paul wrote, “If we have been united with him [Jesus] in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom. 6:5–6, my emphasis).
Sin—grappling for self—is a cruel master. There is never enough fame, glory, money, love, respect, sexual gratification. “Am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Gal. 1:10). Our flesh demands more and more. It is not only hard drugs that have diminishing returns. It is anything of the flesh. And so, even as we seek more, we find ourselves with less.
Freedom to Serve
God has not given us self-actualizing independence. He did not in- tend for us to twist the freedom he gives us for his purposes into freedom to be used for our own agendas. To use our freedom for our personal gain is to buy into the lie of the Enemy.
Surprising to our Western sensibilities, the Bible unflinchingly refers to Christians not as individualists but as servants or slaves (in Greek the word is duolos, which can be translated as either servant or slave, depending on the context9). Servants are those who choose to serve another. Slaves are those who must serve someone else because they are owned by that person. In Christ, both senses are true for the Christian. Because Christ has paid our ransom, we can joyfully be his slave and choose to serve him.
Our Western individuality is undone when we see ourselves as servants. Servants seek the fulfillment of their masters before they seek fulfilling themselves. This hardly fits with our American notions of what our lives are supposed to look like. It’s not surprising, then, that more than a few pastors and churches have erased the biblical call on us to be servants of Christ. Unfortunately, doing so causes us to miss out on freeing truths about who we are.
Peter’s perspective is profound: we are free in Christ, and yet that freedom is to be used for our Master. Peter says, “Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God” (1 Peter 2:16).
We are tempted to believe that freedom is found when we achieve self-mastery. But true freedom is only found when Christ is our Master.
This excerpt is from Trading Faces: Removing the Masks that Hide Your God-Given Identity by John and Angel Beeson.
Available on Amazon.com.
