Identity

I don’t know that I know how to become who I’m designed to be, but pop-psychology keeps telling me that I’m supposed to go find myself.  I guess that implies that I’m lost.  After all, why would I need to find myself if I knew where I was?  There are times when I feel like I’ve come close to tasting my purpose—to that place where I momentarily experienced the joy of being what I was meant to be.  There are many times when I’ve definitely felt like I’m far away from that place—far away from the person I’m built to be.

It’s challenging to know who I’m supposed to be, so I try to be a lot of versions of me.  I’m highly adaptable like that.  I can switch facades and transform exteriors to suit what I think I need to be—or what I’ve convinced myself that those around me need me to be.

That’s the difference between having a black belt and being a black belt, I think.  It becomes a question of identity.  Do I wear the black belt or does the black belt define me?  Am I still me without it, or would I disappear if it went away?

I always hated rules meetings.  The deeper I grew into my career the less I liked them.  Of course, rules meetings are part of the routine—all the fighters come together in a room several hours before the fights start.  They participate in quick medical examinations and sit in a room sizing each other up (from as much distance as that room will allow) while the referee reminds them of the rules that they all should already know.

It’s a strange place.  The energy is always high, and the nerves are always palpable.  I was there to fight on the main event that night, for a title.  I’d earned enough of a reputation and had enough fights that I’d earned that shot against a tough opponent.  It was going to be a good night for me, but that good night was hours away.  I still had to get through the rules meeting.

I was sitting there with my coaches tapping my foot with barely subdued anxiety as the head referee finished his dialogue.  He reminded us of all the rules and was just about ready to let us go to our warmup rooms to begin preparation.  First, he turned to all of us in the room and asked, “are there any questions?”

I didn’t have any.  I’d danced this dance plenty of times.  I knew what I was getting into and I knew what to expect.  But there was one young fighter who did have a question.  His hand slowly rose into the air, catching the referee’s eye.  The referee nodded in his direction.

“You have a question?”

“Yes,” that young fighter said respectfully, “are nerve strikes legal?”

That was the moment I knew he was going to lose.

I knew that he was going to lose (and he did), because I had been a lot like him before.  I sympathized with the man.  Before I started actually fighting, I thought I was good at martial arts.  After all, I had three black belts.  That meant I was good at martial arts.

I had worked hard for them.  I’d bled for them.  I suffered injury for them.  I logged countless hours in pursuit of this knowledge.  Eventually, at the expense of great effort, somebody with a title like Guro or Sensei acknowledged the sacrifices I made.  It made me feel pretty good about myself, and there was a time I let it become the most significant thing about me.  It was hard not to.  I looked good in my black belt(s), and I couldn’t help but puff out my chest just a little bit.

When I decided to try out competitive fighting I learned that I had based my martial arts identity—and, therefore, much more of actual identity—on fallible foundations.  The world of martial arts was a little strange when I was starting out.  Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and MMA were new concepts on the world stage that were proving a threat to “traditional” martial arts.

But everyone who hears these words of Mine and doesn't act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.  The rain fell, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded that house, and it collapsed. And its collapse was great!" (Matthew 7:26-27) 

As a man with three black belts, I assumed I was more than ready for full-contact fighting.  I decided I wanted to test myself, even though I really didn’t think it was going to be that much of a test.  With all of the knowledge and skill I had gained over the years, I was going to have to hold back so I didn’t injure anyone.  After all, I knew how to rip a man’s rib out (yes, that was a technique I learned), I could probably kill someone if I punched them in the right place just right, and, yes, I knew how to use nerve strikes.  I didn’t want to accidentally incapacitate anyone or injure them with my forbidden techniques.

It didn’t take me long to realize how little I had to worry about those things.  My first night of training with actual fighters left me stunned and humiliated.  Despite all my credentials, even the least skilled of the fighters completely wrecked me.  I didn’t have a chance to rip anybody’s ribs out, and I couldn’t find that secret punching place that might kill somebody.  My nerves strikes were completely ineffective.

So much of what I had learned had been utterly useless.  I felt like I had wasted decades of my life.  Everything I thought I was good at—everything I thought I was—had been completely debunked.  It was a crisis of my identity.

The entire way I had seen myself—the way I had grown to view myself from the outside—had been crushed in the span of a single practice.  I realized that my black belts meant nothing.  All the time I had spent puffing out my chest and admiring the look of that black piece of cloth I tied around my waist had culminated into a sloppy night of defeat at the hands (and feet) of athletes who probably couldn’t perform a single kata.  I was devastated.

Because it is so easy for me to build my identity on fragile and breakable things.  I don’t always know that they are fragile and breakable—or maybe I do.  I’d like to think that I wouldn’t try to build an identity around something I knew to be unstable, but I also think I do that all the time.

I do it all the time because I don’t always like the identity I own now.  I don’t always like who I am and I don’t like what I’m becoming.  I don’t know how to be content being what God made me to be.  Or maybe it’s that I don’t know how to find the person that God made me to be, or that I’m not willing to do the actual work to find way to being what God made me to be.

I don’t know who I am because I frequently forget what I am.

For we are His creation, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we should walk in them.  (Ephesians 2:10) 

It’s strange to me, some of the narratives that I seem willing to build an identity around.  A few are seemingly worthwhile—they’re not bad things, probably.  There are lot of things I’m pretty good at, and some good stuff that I do.  Others seem to notice me for some of my gifts and abilities, so those are especially enticing.  If I let myself become the person that garners so much notice, I could live a lifetime of basking in that approval.  It could be bliss, but that approval is temporary and fleeting.  An identity formulated for the approval of others will—must—disintegrate in time.

It’s not just the good things that I’ll build an identity around, either.  When I was young I thought my purpose was to be a minister.  I went to Bible college and started youth pastoring in a small church.  It’s not necessarily important that the attendance numbers increased, but that’s often how churches define success.  According to the metrics, my ministry was successful.  The young people I ministered to appeared to thrive and flourish.  I felt pretty good about myself in those days.  It felt like I was wearing a spiritual black belt of sorts.

Then it all fell apart.  My identity crashed to the ground.  After years of ministry I managed to wreck everything—some due to my failures and some due to the failures of others.  Little more than two months of adversity separated me from my identity.  It was brutal.

I carried that damage forward.  Maybe there wasn’t a way not to.  All these years later (and it’s been a lot of years), I still struggle to not let that failure become my identity.  I’m weird like that.  I actually struggle not to not define myself by the worst things about me.

It was only the fourth fight I had ever fought, but it had definitely earned me a reputation.  I’d lost that fight.  I’d lost it in the last round, but I probably should have lost it in the first round.  He’d beaten the brakes off of me, but I’d been too stubborn to acknowledge defeat.  I was punched in the face, kneed in the head, and generally mauled for the entire fight.  In the end I had gone home looking like a horror movie.

Later, after my swollen eyes had healed enough that I could see clearly, I had read some of the articles written about me.  They had called me “tough” and they had called me “relentless”.  They celebrated the fact that I had proven willing to take a beating and never quit.  It garnered me attention in the community.   There were articles written online about me that lauded my “iron jaw”.

I didn’t feel like I had any choice but to embrace this identity that had been imposed upon me.  I decided that I was going to fight like a “tough” fighter.  I eschewed silly things like head movement and circling.  I made a habit of fighting my way forward and absorbing damage, no matter the cost.  And that cost was great.  I still wear scars to this day.

I have a habit of letting myself be defined by the worst things about me.  Somehow I let them become thing that I convince myself that it is impossible to be rid of.  I tell myself that my failures and shortcomings are simply who I am. 

Usually, I think, I don’t know that I’m allowing my identity to slip away from me.  I’m not aware that I’m allowing myself to define myself by everything but the me God created me to be.  There are usually indicators—symptoms of a sort—that telegraph some sort of warning when I am drifting to the outside of my purpose.   I find myself restless and fighting against constant anxiety, unable to settle into the self that simply doesn’t fit. 

I become uncomfortable and unsettled.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  I don’t think I want to be comfortable with being something I’m not meant to be.

I try on identities like I would body armor, trying to see if it fits in such a way that would both protect me and allow me to move at the same time.  I might wear it as a shield, defending me from the disapproval of others—that’s a thing I’m vastly uncomfortable with.  I might wear it as a beacon because I’m terrified at the prospect of insignificance.

In the end, none of it matters.  The significance of every identity I slip in and out of fades at the brilliance of the one I was designed for—my Telos.  When God looks to me and to the identities I have been struggling to force myself into He doesn’t retreat from my poor efforts at creating myself.

Instead, He peers deeply into every facet of my every failed attempt and appeals—maybe even demands—for me to surrender all to Him.  He doesn’t ask for just the lovely parts—the ones that are palatable and presentable to a general public.  He doesn’t elevate the beautiful parts of the me I’ve striven to be.  He requires of me the ugliness, too.  Maybe, even, He wants that more than the stuff that isn’t so pleasant to see.

He tells me that He is going to give me something better.  He is going to give me an identity that is built, not on me and my clumsy perceptions, but on His love and creative force.  He is going to make me the best version of myself, even if I might resist it along the way.  He already knows what that looks like.  After all, He has the blueprint.  He’s the one who built me to be what I’m supposed to be.

But everything that was a gain to me, I have considered to be a loss because of Christ.  More than that, I also consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Because of Him I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them filth, so that I may gain Christ.  (Philippians 3:7-8)