Coming Soon: Identity Study
It’s been a minute since I have posted and I want to share with you why. I have been developing a Bible study as a final project for my master’s, but I am also praying it will be a helpful resource to address an issue that I see today. Let me explain… The most feedback I have gotten from any of my posts has been in response to the enneagram. To be honest, it was the post I was most nervous about because I know how beloved the enneagram is in the Christian community. So it only makes sense that it would be the one with the most traffic, God has a sense of humor. But that got me thinking about what I see as a repetitive theme that people today seem the most confused about and hungry to solve: identity. The question of “who am I” seems to be the underlying question motivating many behaviors and movements today. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say we have an identity crisis in our culture today. Why are self-help books flying off the shelf? Why did the enneagram become so popular so fast? Why are we all drawn to personality quizzes and tests? Why are people more than ever before confused and questioning their gender?
At 24, I went to my first ever Church women’s retreat after becoming a Christian earlier that year. During a breakout session, we were asked to write on a piece of paper who we are. I sat there confused, slightly embarrassed, and insecure. I didn’t have a great answer for this, and it seemed like everyone around me was writing a novel. Years before I had been asking this question and after college graduation, I was determined to find the answer. I moved to Colorado with grand visions of doing yoga on top of a mountain and discovering who I truly was. Sadly, this is not a joke. It just seemed to me like everyone else had it figured out. Who they were and what they wanted to be when they grew up. What groups they belonged to and what they believed. Meanwhile I was questioning everything.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my questions really stemmed from confusion about who God was and who he made me to be. I see that same question circling around our nation today. Is God actually good? Can he be trusted? Did he really create all of earth? Is he involved in my life or is he distant? When he looks at me, is he disappointed? Or is he even real? Sadly, I think most people are walking around unaware of God at all. Instead, they are on this path of self-discovery spurred on by the latest self-help book and Instagram influencer. How can I take my career to the next level or be my best self? After all, when you discover your true self, all of life is assured to be better, right?
I too have been on this journey of finding answers to these questions. A couple of years ago, God began to put an idea in my heart of going back to school. Through studying theology, I feel God has revealed the knowledge of who he is in a deeper way than I have known before. We have been tasked with writing a Capstone, a paper or project that would determine whether or not we had earned our master’s degree. As I stewed over what I wanted to write about, God gave me the vision of a study, something that would utilize many of the concepts I have studied all while focusing on something that I found to be a pressing issue today: identity.
My capstone project is an 8-week Bible study centered on identity: finding the truth of who you are in a world filled with false labels. Through looking at God’s word, we will study the truth of who God is and how we were made in his image. We will see how sin entered the world and how that image has been distorted. How salvation through Jesus affects God’s image on our lives and how to live in the world today as we await eternity. We will also look at our future hope and how God will finally restore our image in Heaven. I hope that through this study, God will reveal to you who he is, who you are, and what that means for your life today. This study was written to me as a young adult. It is also a reminder to me now, a tribute to who God is and the wonderful hope we have in him. I am hoping to bring regular blog posts back in the near future as we test for truth together.