“Who Do You Say I Am?”

Years ago, my husband and I had a young woman living with us who needed help growing into the person God created her to be. Because of the pain of her childhood, relationships were a constant struggle for her and it was no different with us. She struggled  to connect with both me and my husband, sometimes becoming defensive or feeling wounded. We were trying to negotiate a particularly thorny issue when, all of a sudden, I had a revelation and saw the problem clearly: she had all walls and no boundaries. In that moment, I was aware that the primary thing she had had to learn growing up was how to defend and protect herself. 

That had worked - she had survived her hard and traumatic growing-up years, but it was less than helpful in her current situation. First of all, it took a lot of energy to be in that defensive posture all the time. Secondly, when those walls were up, she couldn’t get any help from the outside, which she sorely needed.

Conversely, she had no boundaries - no identifiable edge that said this is where I end, and you begin. She was a person in search of personhood, readily accepting whatever people told her about herself, whether or not it was even accurate. She had no real sense of who she was. It appeared to me that she had developed a number of ways to cope with the pain of her life; alcohol, drugs, troubled relationships, but she had assumed that those things were in fact her identity. In her mind, she had reduced who she was to what she did. She had no awareness of the unique person God had created when He made her. 

You see, identity - knowing who we really are - is a community affair. In a perfect world our parents, and then extended family and friends, would help us discover and uncover what God put in us. It just can’t be done alone. We need community to show us who we truly are and then help us cultivate that identity if we are to flourish. 

The story that comes to mind is from Matthew 16 when Jesus asks His disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answers that He is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Jesus tells Peter that he is blessed because “flesh and blood” did not reveal this truth to him - it came from the Father. Jesus then goes on to tell Peter who he is: the rock upon which Jesus would build His community. Peter and Jesus identify one another.

In the case of the young lady my husband and I were helping, her unique identity was buried and hidden, dormant beneath layers of assumed false  identities, which was her best attempt to keep going despite the pain in her life. With much prayer, conversation and practice with us, her true self began to emerge. She overcame her dependence on alcohol, completed her GED, and reunited with her husband. I worked with her on some learning and study skills and she went on to college and, later, a career as a surgical tech. She discovered and then began living her life as God intended - from the inside out - walls gently removed by Jesus. In their stead now stand strong, vibrant boundaries brightly outlining the fun, loving person she truly is.

 And what about you? Would you benefit from exchanging walls for boundaries with the help of Jesus and His family? I pray that with each passing day we are all becoming a bit more of the unique people God created us to be.