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We choose some of our roles. I chose to become a wife, chose to write, chose to work at my job. Other people choose some roles for us: I had no control over whether I’d be the mother of the bride someday.
Still other roles may be foisted on us in life.
My father, for example, would never have chosen the title of “widower” for himself.
Only in the blogosphere are we truly free to choose our identity.
In college I had a good friend who, as a teen, had surrendered her newborn for adoption. At a party one evening, another, newer friend started to rant: “What kind of mother could abandon her baby? How on earth could a mother be so heartless and cold?” I watched my friend shrink into herself as our new friend continued her tirade. I hurt for her.
And years later, I learned that our new friend had been adopted. The night of that dreadful dorm party, she’d recently located her birth mother–and her birth mother had refused to engage with her.
Most of us don’t willingly share all our roles. We drift along like breathing icebergs, carrying much of ourselves beneath the surface. And when those hidden aspects collide, as they did for my two friends all those years ago, the impact can really hurt.
All these complicating bits of who we are make me all the more grateful for the most important role I’ve chosen to embrace: child of God.
For better and for worse, He knows me. He knows what I carry beneath the surface and He loves me anyway. All my earthly achievements, causes of shame, and secret scars–both borne and dealt–from collisions with other icebergs fade before the knowledge that I am forever His, loved and forgiven.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
24 And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way.
Psalm 139:23-24 (NASB)
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