The Essence of Me

Life seems to come in cycles of thoughts and circumstances. I don't know the rhythm of it all, but I have noticed that one the repeating stages in my life is wondering who I am. Maybe it's a writer thing, or maybe it's simply human. The age-long question "Who am I?" was floating in the air around me wherever I went last week. Charity Yost sometimes gets buried underneath who everyone else thinks I am or what everyone wants from me. Mostly, it's the dichotomy of who I used to be versus who I want to be that makes me lose sight of who I actually am right now. I have been trying to dig deep into myself and find out what made me different from everyone else. I wanted something that took me out of the cookie-cutter -- a writing style, an accent, a personality, a testimony, or the combination of it all-- just something that was mine alone. But, everything that I found about myself, someone else already had. It was quite depressing. I wanted to be me.

Meanwhile, the item deep within the core of my being that separated me from everyone else was there. I had given up on finding it when it appeared. The only thing that I have that no one else can possibly possess is my relationship with Jesus Christ. No one else has that! They have their own unique relationships with Him, but no one has mine. Although Christ makes me different from the rest of the lost world, having Christ does not separate me from other Christians. Many people have Him. Many more should. Still, Christ is not my uniqueness. The glory of Him is that He unites me with others in His body of believers, not separating me from them. What is separately unique is my personal relationship with Him. No one else has that! I do. Other people have wonderful relationships with Him, but not one of those are the same.

That relationship, accompanied by a unique history and calling, is given to us even before our births (1 John 1:9). Christ and His will are eternal. I had not lost my identity in Christ; I had forgotten about it. That revelation broke my heart, and I'm sure that it hurt Him, too. I had not lost the essence of myself. I had forgotten to forget me, and to focus instead on the amazing connection that God has with me, and with each individual child that He has. I had pushed the unique relationship away in order to search for things about myself instead of focusing those efforts into strengthening that connection.

Oh Lord, may I never again forget that YOU and you alone make me who I am, not any other individual factor in my life. Thank you for wanting that connection with me. You made it what it is -- special and different.