ID

This past week I had an experience that reminded me how important it is to think about and be sure of your identity. In my class, we talked about what kind of information someone can know about you if they had your driver’s license. Your full name, your birthday, what state you are from or currently living in, your address, height, weight, eye color, if you are a donor or not… the list goes on! What really is behind our identity?

It’s interesting to listen to people describe themselves, the attributes and interests that they feel define them, and also the things they feel cannot define them. We all, consciously or not, are continuously molding ourselves to fit an identity that we create. At the same time, others create images of who and what they think we are. And so comes the question: who are we? What determines who we are? Is it based on popular vote? Do certain people have more say than others? What is the reality of our identity?

These are the kinds of questions that many of us have taken time to ponder. They are super relevant. And yet, they can seem impossible to answer. So, how do we know?

I have asked myself these kinds of questions. Not just asked, I’ve stewed over these thoughts and questions. And while I don’t know the complete answer, as I’ve studied the scriptures (the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and other sacred writings) I have come to know more the identity of God our Father, and also His son Jesus Christ. And as I have learned more about them, and focused on what I do know for sure about them, I have become more committed to become as like them as I possibly can. And as I have pursued that, my own undefined status has become more and more absolute. Not because I have created it, but because I am modeling something else defined.

Here’s a recent way that I was able to become more defined. In my class, we started off by talking about a less known book of scripture, the Book of Moses, found in the Pearl of Great Price. In the first chapter, Moses is having a vision in which he talks to God face to face. God starts off by telling Moses who He is, which is All Powerful, Endless, and Almighty. To help Moses understand what “all powerful” and “endless” means, God shows Moses all of His creations. Imagine that! All the planets, creations, people, plants and animals that have ever existed! Imagine being in His presence! I feel like if I were Moses I would have crumbled to the floor, and perhaps would have thought that in all of my life and experience, I would never amount to anything. That is not what God thinks though.

Directly after this powerful display, God calls Moses His son. That’s not just a figure of speech. It’s a real thing. And it doesn’t just apply to Moses, each of us are literally sons and daughters of the most powerful being in existence. What does that really mean? It means that each of us have seeds of “all powerful” and “endless” within us. Each of us can choose to develop those seeds, or leave them aside, but the point is that regardless of what we choose to do with them, they are there.

Suddenly my feelings of being undefined and ever changing, impossible to know and understand, begin to calm as I start to see a picture of what I might become.

What’s interesting is sometimes we fight the idea that we could really ever “mature” to become like God, if we are in fact His offspring. We say this because we think that God is unknowable, too powerful to be contained, with a knowledge and wisdom that would require an eternity to comprehend. And yet, how much more do we understand about ourselves than God? Isn’t that the topic that we started on? That we as beings are too complex to really fully know, even when that being is ourselves? Perhaps our difficulty in comprehending our identity could be considered more as proof that we are offspring of God than evidence against it.