Quotes about Identity

We lead more out of who we are than out of what we do, strategic or otherwise. If we fail to recognize that who we are on the inside informs every aspect of our leadership, we will do damage to ourselves and to those we lead.

The vast majority of us go to our graves without knowing who we are.

The true vocation for every human being is, as Kierkegaard said, "the will to be oneself."5

What is most startling in reading a detailed explanation of what goes on beneath the surface at the age of fifteen is that the same dynamics continue into the twenties, thirties, fifties, seventies, and nineties. We remain trapped in living a pretend life out of an unhealthy concern for what other people think.

By the very act of refusing to succumb to the enormous pressure of Western culture around us, we, too, serve as a sign of a free people. We have been called out of a world trying to prove its worth and value by what it does or possesses. We are deeply loved by God for who we are, not for what we do.

Most of us never examine the scripts handed to us by our past.

God never asks us to annihilate the self. We are not to become "non-persons" when we become Christians. The very opposite is true. God intends our deeper, truer self, which he created, to blossom as we follow him.

The great news of Christianity is that your biological family of origin does not determine your future.

You are a human being made in God's likeness.

Part of that likeness is to feel.

No other religion in the world reveals a personal God who loves us for who we are, not what we do.

To become a Christian and to be adopted into God's family with the new name of "Christian" does not erase the past. God does not give us amnesia or do emergency emotional/spiritual reconstructive surgery. God does forgive the past, but he does not erase it. We are given a new start, but we still come in as babies drinking milk and are expected to die daily to the parts of our lives that do not honor God and follow Jesus.