Living Fearless by Jamie WinshipSample

Identity

After a few minutes of predictable dialogue with the driver taking me to the airport, I asked, “Besides driving folks around, what do you do?”

“My goal is to open up a barbecue restaurant in Belize.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Is that your identity?”

“I don’t know. I guess it is.”

“Running a restaurant’s not an identity; it’s a vocation. What is your identity? Who are you?”

“I don’t know. Where does a person get an identity?”

“Where do you think?”

“Maybe from God?” he said.

“Yes, could be,” I said. “That’s a possibility.”

I could tell he was thinking, and I had been waiting for this.

“What’s your identity?” he asked.

“Well, my identity is militant peacemaker,” I said to the driver.

“Wow,” he said.

“I know what vocations enable and empower that identity, and I’ve known this since I was fourteen. Therefore, my vocation has been with the police department, something involved in militant peacemaking.” I told the driver I had been a police officer, then I got promoted a lot, then I got recruited by the government, and then I went overseas. My militant peacemaking started small and kept expanding. Professionally, spiritually, up, up, up.

The gates of hell cannot stand against us moving in our true identity.

“If that’s true,” I said to my friend, “how dangerous is it to live a life with no sense of your identity? “You mean I would have an identity that leads to running a restaurant?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, that’s it.”

“And the restaurant would just be an extension of my identity?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“I need to find my identity. Maybe I need to go to God and find my identity,” he said.

This is how Jesus talks to people. In the entire conversation, I never said one thing about being a Christian. The conversation was about personal identity, not empty ideology.

When the guy dropped me off, he asked for my card. We’re going to meet so he can hear God tell him his identity. I didn’t suggest that, he did. That’s called sharing your faith. That’s how simple it is, but you cannot give away what you don’t have. You cannot give to another person something you yourself do not possess. The journey in discovering your true identity in the kingdom of God is an eternal journey. There is no end to the depths of who God made you to be.

So, what is your identity? Who is your true self?