Soul Questioning

I realized somewhere well into my fourth decade of life that the question “Who am I”?” would likely be an eternal question, answered in the moment but always being refined and redefined in the next moment.

This question and confusion about identity seems to be unique to the human condition, and is an unnecessary conundrum to the rest of the created world. Fish and bird and warm blooded mammals, tree and weed and planetary wonders seem content as they are, where they are, in season and out. They require no further definitions. The grass never questions why it may live for a day and wither away. It never compares its life to the centuries-old cedar. It doesn’t fuss over why it exists or how to make the most of its allotted life span. But the God-ordained complexity of being human requires a different kind of knowing.

We need look no further than the creation story to find the basis for our identity dilemma. As we reached beyond the Creator to form our own identity and feed our own pleasures and stitch together and devise our own objects to hide behind, God still sought us out, reached toward us and asked the first soul-searching question, “Where are you?”

Questions of identity always consider the landscape of the soul, where we are living, where we are in hiding—in deserts, in lush gardens, or on mountain tops. It wonders about how we (or others) may have twisted God’s intended beauty of our true identity into something that causes shame or pain. Still the Lord never leaves us, never deserts us, but rather goes with us throughout human history, generation to generation, reaching, speaking, calling, giving us glimpses of glory in all of creation and, above all, glimpses of glory within our own souls.

So, who are you? Where are you? Where do you see God’s light shining through it all?