Who Am I Meant to Be?

Be who God made you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”

Catherine of Siena

But who am I? What if I don’t know who it is He created me to be? 

I know that my purpose in life is to know God, to love Him, to serve Him in this life and to be happy with Him forever in the next. I recognize the gifts He has given me I try to use them to the best of my ability. I try to let Him use me as He wills, when He wills, however He wills. But when Our Lord has been so generous in gifting me, what is all of that supposed to look like? Am I doing this right? Lord, are You sure this is where You want me to be when my path seems so different from others’ calls? When it seems like the road You’ve put me on is one I’m traveling alone?

I want to trust. But this road is winding, and the woods are dark, and I can’t see well enough ahead to know what comes next, who I will turn out to be.

And friends, to be honest with you, it doesn’t matter that I can’t see. Right here, right now, the great tapestry God is weaving with our lives—it’s not for us to see. Our mission is not for us to become God, to snatch the work from His hands. Our mission is to become who He made us to be. 

I am not yet that person, not completely, not fully. But I am becoming that person. And that’s the key: to continue becoming.

I wrote about that theme a few months ago, in “Maintaining the Interior Garden of Our Hearts.” God doesn’t call us to be perfect. Only He is perfect. As an advisor once told me when I was fretting over not being good enough to enter into the coursework set before me, “God doesn’t call us to perfection. He calls us to excellence.”

God won’t call me to do the impossible. He acknowledges what we are, who we are, where we are, and He works with it. No work is beyond Him.

I am a broken vessel in the hands of the Master Potter. I am a great, stubborn stone whose rough, unsteady, broken parts are being chiseled away by the Master Sculptor. I am a rock, hopelessly sinking, who over the course of many long years will have its sediment eroded away in the Ocean of Mercy. And underneath the caked dirt and solidified sand, the King of Heaven uncovered the radiant jewel He’d been searching for. The little jewel He’d always known was there, underneath the weight of all I carry.

The thing to strive for is to let Him make me, to let Him form and shape me. To let Him do the work He knows is best. In Our Lord’s Hands, and only in His hands, the broken pieces of my life are molded together to become a work of art.

So who am I meant to be? When I am at various times a vessel, a stone, a jewel? When the pieces of me can become an artwork to stand in the galleries of Heaven? What is it that I’m supposed to continue becoming?

It’s simple, really. The answer is written on our hearts. It’s at the tip of our tongues. But sometimes when I get caught up in all this wondering, I ask Him just for reassurance. “Lord, who am I, really?” 

His response? “You are Mine, Beloved of My Heart.”

More than anything else I can be, more than anything I can become, I am His.

Anything that makes me forget that, anything that causes me to doubt that, is a distraction from His creative work. To forget Whose I am (His) and who I am (still His) takes me out of that work of becoming. It derails my focus. It turns my attention away from His healing and redemption, and instead draws me to focus intensely on my wounds.

And that focus on woundedness, brokenness, and failure only breeds fear. Maybe I’m too broken for Him to heal. Maybe I strayed too far for Him to bring me back. Maybe I’ve failed so badly that He doesn’t even want me to belong to Him anymore. Why would He, infinite and almighty, care so much about little me?

In that space, I become susceptible to the same lie that Eve fell for in the garden: Did God really say that? Does He reallylove me? As guest poster Jacqueline Lucca writes in “What Eve and Mary Have Taught Me About Dating,” we can approach these questions of our self-worth in God’s eyes either with Eve’s doubt or Mary’s faith: “Do we truly believe that He knows and wants what is best for us?”

Whatever the serpent in the garden, the Father of Lies, tells us, God does love us. God does want what’s best for us. And His plan is ultimately for our good. Satan can’t create. He can only twist what God has made, and he’s an expert at twisting the truth so that, if we listen, our thoughts become muddled, no longer fully clear on where the line exists, where truth ended, and the lie began.

And then we fall into doubting, questioning, flailing in the dark with only the beam of a tiny flashlight and a question—who am I, really?

But now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
    he who formed you, O Israel:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
    I have called you by name, you are mine.” 

Isaiah 43:1

That is what matters. That’s the thing that is important. That is my identity. I am His. And that’s where the focus of my attention should be. That is a truth I can rest in. Rest without wandering. Rest without doubt. Restful surrender.

Keep making us, Lord. Keep shaping us. And give us all the grace to continue becoming who You made us to be.