I was fourteen years old, 5’9” and 130 pounds. My backpack hung loosely over my shoulders and butterflies filled my stomach. It was the first day of high school. I navigated the path from my fourth period class toward the cafeteria in a sea of three thousand mostly new faces. Who would I sit with? I saw the group of guys I had hung around with in middle school: jocks who had made those three years fairly miserable for me.
I scanned the grass and picked out the groups: band kids, several kids playing chess, kids playing pick-up basketball. I saw one gathering playing Dungeons and Dragons. I looked hesitantly at the goth crowd and another group of punks and then across several clusters of cool kids. I saw that there were some kids who had isolated themselves in the library. I watched geeks head into teachers’ classrooms for sanctuary, and I saw a collection of Christian kids under a pine tree.
I paused. Who would I be? Could I choose a new identity?
The average grocery store stocks 250 varieties of cereal.[i] Such variety feels exciting, but we know that increased options actually make it harder for us to choose, not easier. In a famous jam experiment, psychologists learned that consumers who were offered six varieties of jam to sample purchased more jam than those who were offered twenty-four.[ii]
For decades, Disney and self-help gurus alike have told us that we can be whoever we want to be. And, in a sense, they are right. We have more options than ever before on who we can be: more career choices, more possibilities for where we can choose to live, who we marry, even how we express our gender and sexual preferences.
But what have these choices netted us? We are more anxious and depressed. 19.1% of the US population will experience an anxiety disorder this year.
Believing that we can choose who we are has not made us happier. Perhaps that is because we weren’t created to choose our own identity. Perhaps it is because we have misunderstood what our identity is.
In Angel and my book Trading Faces: Removing the Masks that Hide your God-Given Identity, we consider the identities the world offers us: identities such as husband or wife, dad or mom, our vocation, or our political allegiance. None of these are bad or unimportant things, but they are all roles and not identity.
God has offered us identities that will provide us peace and purpose as we step into them. In Christ, we are saints, sons, priests, ambassadors, and the bride of Christ. When we open the pages of Scripture, we see that these identities are already accomplished for us through the work of Christ. They are given to us as gifts and create meaning and direction for us. We would love to invite you to more deeply discover who God has made you to be as we take off the faces the world offers for the true faces Christ gives us.
[i] Phil Lempert, “The scoop on cereals,” Today, https://www.today.com/news/scoop-cereals-wbna4112859
[ii]Florent Geerts, “The Jam Experiment—How Choice Overloads Make Consumers Buy Less,” Medium, https://medium.com/@FlorentGeerts/the-jam-experiment-how-choice-overloads-makes-consumers-buy-less-d610f8c37b9b.
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Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash