Pick Your Person: Can You Really Self-identify A Different Reality?

As an adolescent boy I remember watching the Olympics for the first time on our small television with the rabbit ears that had to be pointed in-just-the-right-direction. Winning medal after medal, my hero was a man’s man.

Now, he says he no longer wants to identify with his physical makeup. He “self-identifies” as a woman.

And yesterday I read of a woman who is “self identifying” as a different race in order to obtain jobs and standing as a minority.

These two are personifying a greater trend. We are living in a time when fantasy is the new reality. We are allowing people to deny science, fact, and truth and simply accept and identify with whatever they’ve created.

My own reality

I’m sorry, but there are some things we cannot self-identify. You are what you are. I am what I am.

I cannot self identify to be a 12 year-old boy, just so I can get a discount at the movie theater. I cannot self-identify to be handicapped so I get a close-in parking spot. I cannot self identify as Royalty and live in the Queen’s palace.

I have to deal with my reality.

There are some things about my physical appearance I wish I could change. I dislike the 20 pounds I seem to have carried my whole life. My chin is sharp and my eyes are narrow. I cannot self identify as a Tom Cruise.

I am also a cheater, a liar, a self-promoter, and a manipulator, having taken on those roles and sins at one point or another in my life. For extended periods of my life, I’ve been a bad friend, husband, father, brother, and son. I cannot self-identify as a spotless man.

Here’s a way out

But there’s a way I can slip out of this reality and take on another identity:

Colossians 1. 21-22 says this:

“And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.”

I’m not stuck with all the labels that others have draped over my head. I’m a realist, but I have found tremendous freedom in this Christ-identity.

I feel sorry for these people and every other person who loathes themselves so much that they feel the need to create an alternate personhood. But there are deeper things going on, things that have need a Savior’s hand.

I want to tell them there is an out, a way to change who they they think they are.

Let it go.

That’s it.

Let it go.

Take on Jesus and let him create a new you. Holy. Blameless. Perfect.