Other People Don’t Get to Define Who God Created You to Be

How many times have you tried to change yourself to please someone else? How many times have you thought, “If only I was prettier, smarter, funnier, or different things would be different”? How many times has that worked?

In trying to please someone else, we lose ourselves.

Many of us have been “lost” for a long time. We grew up wanting to please parents and teachers and friends. We acted in ways that we thought those we looked up to would want us to act or in ways that reflected their own behaviors, but we never seemed to measure up the way we hoped.

This is not because those we admired were bad, but because they were imperfect. When we form our understanding of ourselves through imperfect people, that understanding becomes distorted. This is true even if they loved us because we are not meant to reflect humanity. We are meant to reflect the One whose image we bear, and none of us do that perfectly.

One woman I spoke with told me of a time where she attended her husband’s work dinner. She said she wore a cute little black dress hoping to please him and was meeting his colleagues for the first time. She was excited for a night out – something she didn’t often get as a mom of little ones.

Instead, her husband’s friends wanted her to participate in a phone call designed to humiliate another woman. When the woman refused, her husband was disappointed and said she should have gone along and made him look good.

The woman was hurt and confused.

She wondered if she should have been different but also knew she had chosen rightly.

She knew somewhere inside of her that, despite the hurt, she was not created to earn love and affection by hurting someone else.

She knew she wanted no part of the pain they wanted to cause the unknown voice on the other end of the phone line.

I understood what the woman was going through because I have been there.

I can’t say I’ve always done the right thing in those moments though. There have been plenty of times when I went along and did what I knew was wrong because I wanted others to like me.

What I noticed later is that when I get my identity from others, from parents, spouse‘s children, friends, or anyone whose approval I seek, I am far more vulnerable to making choices I regret.

It can be very difficult to do the right thing consistently when your identity has been formed by fallen loved ones. From the time of Adam and Eve, we have inherited the wound of sin. We are descendants of a fallen parentage and those of us who are parents continue those imperfections on to the next generation.

That’s why it is important to get our identity from who we actually belong to, God.

God, our Father, is our creator. It is in His image and likeness that we are made. Scripture tells us we are knit together by Him in our mother’s womb. The Catechism tells us we are created to know, love, and serve God in this world so we can be happy with Him for eternity in the next.

But what does getting your identity from God actually mean?

It means we need to know who God, as our Father, is, and, in our broken world, with imperfect parents, that can be difficult.

At the same time, each of us knows what makes a good father. We can recognize those traits in men we know and admire. We read about them in Scripture, literature, and in our news feeds. We see them in the lives of good men.

We can recognize traits of good fathers even if our personal experience of them has not been ideal.

Try it for yourself.

Pause for a few minutes and list traits you think make a good father.

Maybe your list includes things like loving, forgiving, trustworthy, strong, courageous, welcoming, protective, and even disciplinarian when necessary as well as many more.

The interesting thing is that if we compare our lists, I bet we’d find they are very similar.

Why?

Because the desire for God is written in the human heart. The catechism in section 27 teaches, “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.”

We were created for God.

As children, we couldn’t understand this. As adults, we have the freedom and the responsibility to fill gaps in our understanding of God as our Creator, Healer, and Father in addition to knowing Him as our Savior and our King.

That means taking time daily to get to know Him through reading at least a few lines of Scripture, spending time with Him, and asking Him to show you who He is.

Discover, what makes Him trustworthy.

What is in His Heart.

What has He revealed about Himself?

The more we know God as He truly is, the more we can begin to separate His character from the character of the broken people who represented Him poorly.

That matters because broken people do not get to define God.

And if they do not get to define God, they do not get to define you.

You were created in the image and likeness of your Father. The catechism teaches that the dignity of the human person is rooted in this creation in the image and likeness of God.

When we begin to understand that, we live for more than someone else’s approval and begin to make choices based, not on what will make us accepted, but on what is true and good. .

We can begin to love ourselves rightly, not because we are perfect, but because we understand whose we are. We live knowing we, as created the image and likeness of God, have a unique and special place in eternity.

That eternal identity becomes the foundation for how we know, love, and serve others, not out of a desire to be wanted or loved, but out of a desire to reflect the One who first wants and loves us.

That love fuels compassion for those who raised us while giving us wisdom to establish firm boundaries when necessary to guard our hearts.

It helps us recognize those who would lead us astray and times we would be tempted to give away “just a little bit“ of ourselves to keep someone else happy.

It changes more than how we act with others.

It changes how we think and feel when we are alone.

It is the very core of how we see ourselves.

It changes how we love ourselves.

And that changes the foundation from which we love others.

We tend to see God through those closest to us, those who should have protected and provided for us, those who should have loved us. This makes it difficult to know God as He truly is.

Yet difficult is not impossible!

This week you can begin knowing who you are by taking a step forward in trust toward your Father by beginning to understand Him.

Take five minutes each day to ask God to reveal Himself to you.

Then choose one Scripture to meditate on.

Sit in silence before the Blessed Sacrament. Read Scripture slowly. Write a letter to God the Father while pondering the Truth about who He is and who you are as someone created in His image.

Ask yourself:

If I truly believe that God is who He says He is, how would I live differently?

How would I act?

How would I respond?

What would I stop doing?

What would I begin doing?

Then choose one area of your life and take small step toward transformation. This is not a performance to earn God’s Love, but in trust as you learn to live from the truth of who you are.

You don’t have to become someone else to be worthy of love.

You don’t have to earn your identity.

You don’t have to let the people who wounded you define you.

You were created in the image and likeness of God.

So perhaps the question isn’t, “How do I become who everyone else wants me to be?”

Perhaps the better question is…

“Who is God, and who am I because I belong to Him?”

God Bless…

Kerri

Join the Fiercely Formed newsletter for challenge, encouragement, Scripture, and community here or, share your thoughts directly in the message below. Why not do both?

Either way, I’d love to hear from you! 🙂