The story of how God took 1 semester and changed my identity.
For context, I wrote this journal in November 2020. I was in the middle of my first fall semester at Baylor, one of the hardest and most painful times of my life. This was written as a sort of declaration that God is doing something GOOD even when I don’t understand it. The only truth is that I have a good, good father who’s bigger than what I see. He changed my performance-based identity to God-based identity.
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“My life has never been as crazy and uncertain as it is right now. I have never dealt with
anxieties like these, with questions and doubts like these, or with insurmountable dread like I’ve
had these past weeks. I didn’t realize how good I had it before I came to Baylor and started on
my journey to academic success. Compared to this life was easy.
My relationship with God was good, but I always knew deep down that there was stuff in my life that I hadn’t uncovered enough for God to work on. But that never kept me from searching and pursuing Him. I would
read His Word and seek His face and even lead others to His wisdom and knowledge. Knowing
the Lord and being near to Him is the only fulfilling and pleasing thing in this life. Just because
there were parts of me that I didn’t know were hidden, or at least I wasn’t willing to admit that
they were hidden, did not mean that I didn’t encounter God in beautiful ways.
God doesn’t penalize you for a lack of faith or transparency.
But because I didn’t give God my everything, God wasn’t able to be my everything. Because I was holding on to a part of me, I was indirectly putting a limit on what God could and couldn’t do. But what I did let God change, he did. He is faithful and wants the best for you, but He’s also a gentleman. He knocks, waiting at your door for you to hear Him and let Him in.
School and Identity
I’ve always known that a large portion of my identity laid within my grades and how well I performed in school. From a young age I never really felt like I fit in. I felt like I was too far to one extreme for me to be
accepted. I was too weird, too bossy, too quiet, too loud, too boring, too
awkward; too much. I was not funny enough, not nice enough, not pretty enough, not thin
enough; not enough. It was always something that I was either too much of or not enough of. But
one thing I could control was how I responded to other people’s judgments.
I decided that to be considered smart meant people would accept me. To be seen as well-educated and well-mannered. If I did well in school that meant I was disciplined, diligent, faithful, responsible,
resourceful, confident, secure, a critical thinker, and every other positive adjective in the book.
School was my road to acceptance. Good thing it came easy to me. Nice! So that means that
because I’m doing good in school then I’m a good, hardworking person who deserves respect.
Yes, I should be accepted because of my own works.
I started building my case for acceptance via school at a young age, around 13 or 14. Fast forward 5 years later, and that motive grafted its way into the very foundation of who I was. In a nutshell, if I did well in school, that meant I was a good person. If I got an A, that meant I was worthy of acceptance because of the work I put into getting that result.
My deeds determined my worth.
Now, to clarify, I never consciously thought this way for the majority of my academic career, but it was what my motives were founded on, and eventually I never even noticed was there. I never had to worry about getting a bad grade or failing a class because it all came pretty easy for me. I always did well in school so nothing ever challenged my case for acceptance.
A prayer answered, but not how I wanted
Life was good. At least I thought it was. But through praying for God to reveal what parts of myself that I had, up until this point, kept hidden from God, God answered in a way that I wasn’t, and still am not, prepared for. To analogize my feelings about this whole situation, it feels like I asked God to take the splinter out of my finger but instead cut out the cancer in my heart and brain.
It’s not what I asked God to do per se, but it still needed to happen nonetheless. In fact, it still needs to happen nonetheless.
God saw my dependence and knew I couldn’t live like this forever
I need to be freed from these lies in order to live freely in God’s plan for me. I can’t be dependent on my own works if God wants to use me in ways where the only way to survive is by depending fully on Him. What would life have been like if after school I never broke that dependence? How would I survive if I didn’t have grades to
prove my worth? What happens when I don’t get grades anymore? What decides my worth then?
Maybe that’s why I got so depressed and lost when school ended during winter and summer
breaks. When I have nothing to measure my worth, I become nothing.
Wow. God is a great planner, isn’t he? God saw my struggles and dependencies and because of the good, good Father that He is, He wants to rescue me from that before I lose myself completely.
This season feels like I’m breaking, but I’m not. I’m growing. The only thing that’s breaking is the hold the enemy had on me.
God’s not just pruning me, He’s eradicating poison and pulling out a parasite
from my roots and soil. He’s making me stronger every day, but first I need to go through a
difficult pruning season. He first needs to break that dependence in order to build a new one. It
hurts. It hurts a lot. My life has never felt more hopeless than when I received the first couple
grades and was led to reconsider the whole reason I’m even at Baylor.
Tearing down occurred before the building up
Looking back, life wasn’t good before this season. It was a life built on a facade of hope
shadowed by the ever-creeping thought of “what happens when this is over?” It was a bridge
waiting to fall. A few precise hits and the whole thing comes crashing down. I say this because
that’s exactly what happened.
One hit was a blow to the ego, the second hit was a blow to the confidence I had in myself, and the third hit was the blow that brought the rest of my life crumbling with it. Or so it felt.
In reality, my life didn’t fall down or apart. It actually is falling more and more together.
The pain I feel isn’t me breaking, it’s the pain of weeds and vines being
pulled out of my veins. It’s growing pains. It’s God stretching me to make room for His presence
and glory to rest. He’s not breaking me, He’s building me.
Praise God. Isn’t he so faithful and kind that He allows us to go through seasons that make us grow and become better! He wants so much for us and has so much planned for us that will only make our days on earth better. He is the only way to life, His ways are perfect and will always benefit us.
Some days are harder than others… Some days seem unbearable with the amount of pressure I carry. But God has freed us from a life of worry or stress and gives us peace.”
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I ended the semester passing all my classes and spiritually stronger than I had ever been. A true representation that in order to become a diamond, you have to go through a lot of pressure first. To gain muscles, you have to go through the pain of hard work first. I then knew exactly what it meant to trust God with EVERY part of me, and how now the only reason I’m writing this today is BECAUSE of HIM!
God broke off all that was not of Him and replaced it with Himself.
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