Who Am I?

I am fascinated by personality tests. When an unfamiliar test, instrument, or inventory comes along, I eagerly fill in all the bubbles, calculate the results, study the explanation, and share my new insights with everyone unlucky enough to be nearby. Some of my family members don't share my interest in these tests. They tire of my talking about them. They just don't see the appeal.

So why do I find these things so interesting? I guess I long to know who I am, to know my name. For some reason I don't clearly understand, I am still not sure I know who I am, not completely.

Names have meaning. They define us. In the Bible a person who encounters God in a powerful way is sometimes given a new name, a new identity. The book of Revelation says that in the end, each of us will be given a new name. 

Sometimes in the course of walking through this world, we are burdened with wrong names. Robbed of our true identities and saddled with false identities that enslave us.

Recently an old injury, one that came from being maliciously misnamed began paining me again. I think Satan does that, uses wounding words and circumstances to repeatedly misname us. He reinforces the false message until we believe it. We think we have no choice but to sigh heavily and slog through life being who we are told to be, like a person wearing ill fitting clothes that chaff and rub. 

In the past few weeks this concept of receiving a true name from God has come up in a variety of unrelated ways, in conversations with friends, in a book I am reading, in an email...God is creating in me a desire to strip off and discard the false names I've been unwittingly wearing around for far too long. I am hungry for a new name, a name that fits, and calls me forward into the next era of my life. I can't wait to find out what it is. Like Jacob who wrestled with God and refused to let go until he was blessed with a new name, I plan to hang on and wrestle until I know my name.