Identity

Every story in order to draw the listener or reader in, must have a good plot. We have all gone to a movie because it has big name actors or crazy effects only to find out that it has absolutely no story line and it is void of a real plot. Plot is to a story what identity is to an individual. Each person needs an identity. It is crucial to who we are. Where we find that identity is the challenge of today's culture. I work with teenagers as a morality teacher and I see more and more how much teenagers today are at a loss to really know who they are. They are searching for an identity, for their own story, and are turning to anything they can to try to establish one.

Take a trip back in time with me for a moment to reflect on how we got to be a culture of people struggling with identity. During the period of the enlightenment science and technology took off. Reason became the mantra of this period. People thought that everything could be solved through science. Pope Benedict XVI said of the Enlightenment "people believed they could regain paradise lost through science and technology. They moved their hope from Jesus to science." Deep inside us we long to get back to the the perfection that Adam and Eve experienced in the garden and in a way the enlightenment period thought they could get back there through science and technology. Society started seeing science as their savior instead of God. We lost a sense of the grand storymaker and with a loss of Him came a loss of the story itself. People then had to make up their own story.

Fast forward to the Baby Boomer generation. The baby boomers took this idea of creating your own story to an extreme. It was during this time that people started telling their kids "you can be anything you want to be." They lived during a time of great advancement and so they were dreaming big. They were giving them permission to write their own story. This might sound great and like something an "inspirational speaker" would say but in reality it isn't true. I couldn't be an NBA player. God just didn't make me a super tall, super athletic person. When we tell children that they basically make their own story and their own identity we are by default telling them that they have no identity until they create one themselves. Their worth then is self made. This is a terrible burden for someone to carry during their teenage years when their identity is most questioned. It is like sending them into a storm with no compass. The wind can push them any which way. Why is the generation after the baby boomers called generation X? Because they had no real identity. The generation after that is called generation Y, because well, that is what comes after X. Human beings need to know that they have an identity. That they have a story. Yes we are writing our own story through our life but we have the best co author possible, God himself. If we loose site of Him, the story becomes very confusing and tough to write. We don't need to make up our story or create our own identity. God has given us an identity as his child. Instead of telling kids they can be anything they want to be let's start giving them permission to be exactly who God made them to be!