But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re waiting in the grocery store aisle for two minutes. We listen to podcasts on our commute. We lea...
Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...
The rise of both video spectacles and marketed consumables is no accidental marriage. Images capture our attention and lure us because they implicitly ask us to try on various costumes of identity, to...
Why a story? We all think of our lives as stories, each with a main character (us) theme, and plot (interesteing so far, but as yet unfinished). We also love to hear stories about others and even abou...
When I engaged with twenty-somethings, for example, who were just entering the adult years, I found them preoccupied with clarifying their identity. What kind of a man or woman am I becoming, they w...
“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat,...
Our selves are fashioned; we are adorned with histories that incline us to saunter, swagger, or shuffle. Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweate...
Is your last name Smith, Miller, Cooper, or Baker? Many surnames have their origin in the trades that your ancestors were identified with. Today, especially with the rise of the “gig economy,” people ...
A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...
The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P...
You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...
We have been created by God, to be loved by God, and to receive our identity from God. But in our everyday lives, as we go about our work, school, interacting with our family and friends, we don’t alw...
According to a December 2014 article in The Economist, there is a “distinct correlation between privilege and pressure.” We may earn more money, but we can never earn more time. And because we’re work...
John 4:13-14, 1 Timothy 6:9-10, Psalm 62:5-6, Jeremiah 2:13, Colossians 3:5, Romans 1:25, Matthew 6:33
I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and I define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. Instead of telling them they are sinning b...
In his wonderful book Run with Horses , Eugene Peterson reminds us of many of the ways in which modern life de-personalizes and degrades us. We become a number and not a name. We are valued for wha...
Pop psychology is wrong when it tells you to look inside yourself and find your value. The magazines are wrong when they suggest you are only as good as you are thin, muscular, pimple-free, or perfume...
Shame makes its way into our stories at an early age. So early, in fact, that we usually have no conscious memory of our initial encounters with it. This can take place as early as fifteen to eighteen...
Romans 12:1, Matthew 5:44, Proverbs 15:1, 1 Peter 3:9, Luke 6:31, Galatians 6:9, Colossians 3:12-13, 1 Corinthians 13:4-5, Genesis 50:20, Philippians 2:3-4, James 1:19-20, 1 Samuel 24:17
Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living...
Identity drives motivation, motivation drives action, and action drives results. For example, if someone speeds past me at ninety miles per hour on the highway, odds are I won’t chase them down and is...
If identity is fluid, then to remain still is to die—or worse, to become irrelevant—and so we never cease our frantic movement in the direction we hope, and pray, is forward..
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? After the Baptism Jesus, still wet from his baptism in the Jordan. Jesus, with the affirmation of the Father still ringing in his ears...
I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God’s counsels, in God’s world, which no one else has; . . . God knows me and calls me by my name.
Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. That is bound up with the central Augustinian claim that we are what we love.
Children have a tendency to say, “Look at me!” On the tricycle: “Look at me go!” On the trampoline: “Look at me bounce!” On the swing set: “Look at me swing!” Such behavior is acceptable for children....