knowing who you are

But Moses said to Pharaoh, "Who am I, that I should and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" (Exodus 3:11)

Who am I? All of life, it seems, is a continual journey to find the answer to that question.  It is the force that drives us and the conundrum that plagues us.  Ever since the Fall, when we became disconnected from the only One who can really give us the answer to our deepest questions of meaning and purpose, we have struggled to come to terms with our true identity.  Who are we?  And what makes us worth loving?  We spend our whole lives trying to answer those questions.  The problem is that we seek an answer in places that can never fully provide one.  We look to the world to tell us who we are, rather than looking to our God.  And the truth is that our identity can never be achieved or manufactured or constructed, it can only be bestowed.  And it can only be bestowed by the One who made us, by the One who dreamt us into being.

But instead of listening to the Voice of Love, we listen to so many other voices.  We listen to the voices of our world and our culture who tell us that we are what we do, we are how we look, or we are what we've got.  We listen to the voices of our anxiety and insecurity and fear.  Or we listen to the voices of our pride and our arrogance and our adequacy.  All of which lead us on a wild goose chase, for none of these voices can tell us what we most deeply long to hear.  None of these things can satisfy the deepest longings of our souls.  So we spend our days trying to become somebody, rather than simply enjoying the fact that (in Christ) we already are somebody. We spend our lives trying to make a name for ourselves, when God has already given us a name, one that he has chosen especially for us.  We work and we sweat and we perform. We measure and we compare and we compete.  We fret and we toil and we strain.  We read books and take tests and go to workshops.  We listen to speakers and webinars and podcasts.  We are so thirsty to know who we really are that we will believe anyone who seems to have a compelling answer.  We are bound and determined to find an identity, even if we have to beg, borrow, or steal one.  But the truth remains that only God can tell us who we really are.  No person, nor number, nor acronym can do that.  At best they can only describe what we have become as a result of the pain and heartbreak of living in this broken world.  They can help us identify the fig leaves that have worked for us thus far as we have attempted to hide our nakedness and our fear and our shame.

For example, contrary to popular belief, you are not a number.  Your enneagram number is not who you are.  It is what you have become.  It is just another "coat against the cold," to borrow a phrase from Frederick Buechner.  It is just another "dragon skin," (to borrow an image from C. S. Lewis) that must be peeled away and discarded.  In the words of the creator of the enneagram himself (Oscar Ichazo), the nine personality types are merely "ego fixations and aberrations."  They are what we have become as a result of living in a fallen world.  Only God can tell us who we really are.  Only Aslan can cut through all of the layers of the fake and the false to get down to what is real and true.  Don't get me wrong, the enneagram can be incredibly helpful in "taking off the old self and its practices" (Col. 3:9), but only Jesus can give you a new (true) self to become.

Moses was an Israelite who was born and raised in Egypt.  We are not told a lot about his family.  We do not know if he ever knew his father, and we do not know exactly how long he knew his mother.  The one thing we do know is that the daughter of Pharaoh was the one who named him and raised him.  In fact, she named him Moses because he was drawn out of the water.  But in Egyptian, the name Moses simply meant son of.  As in, son of no one, son of someone, son of anyone.  You fill in the blank.  So Moses grew up not knowing who he really was.  Thus, it was certainly no mistake that when he came to the burning bush and God told him that he was sending him to deliver the Israelites, Moses' first question was "Who am I?"  for he really didn't know.

And God answered that question in such an amazing way.  He answered it not by telling Moses who Moses was, he answered it by telling Moses who God was--I am.  He did that because we can only know who we are if we first know who God is.  Who I am depends solely on the great I Am.  Our being is derived from his, not vice versa.  Any attempt to know our own identity apart from God is fruitless.  I can only know who I am in relation to knowing who he is.  So the more I get to know God, there more likely I am to know my truest and best self, the one made in his image.