100 Days of HopeSample

Who Am I?

“I don’t know who I am anymore.” These words rang in my ears as they were repeated almost verbatim in separate conversations by three very different followers of Jesus within one week. Thus I was invited into each of their stories and to share my own.

Just one week before the first of these divine appointments, I had engaged in a 20-hour retreat of silence and solitude in the Colorado mountains. During that experience, I sensed a deep emptying of myself as I breathed a simple prayer, “Abba, who am I?”

Serving in my various leadership roles with a desire to perform well and meet others’ needs, I’d forgotten who I was, lost touch with my own feelings and needs. My story was the chief executive’s story, the seminary student’s story, and the recently paroled ex-felon and former gang member’s story.

In his book Abba’s Child, Brennan Manning writes, “Living out of the false self creates a compulsive desire to present a perfect image to the public so that everybody will admire us and nobody will know us. The impostor is what he does.”

Sitting in the mountains that autumn afternoon, I wept as Abba’s gentle reply washed over and filled my emptied self: “You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

I am the Beloved, and so are you.

Prayer: Father, thank you for calling us your sons and daughters. Thank you for your deep and abiding love for us. Help us to find our identity in you, rather than in the things of this world or the expectations of others.