Who I Am

I’ve been a lot of things in life so far. I’ve been a daughter, a sister (both big and little), a friend, a student, a competitive tennis player, an artist, a mentor, a lawyer, an aunt, and more recently a wife. Yet I spent most of my life questioning who I was and if I would ever be enough.

When I was younger, I wondered if I was pretty enough, smart enough, dedicated enough, fit enough - basically anything enough. After I had to walk away from being a competitive athlete in high school due to various medical issues, I questioned who I was as a person. Little did I realize that being an athlete had consumed me; it had secretly become my identity. When the day finally came that I had figure out who I was without the athlete side, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize my reflection. All I could see was someone lacking. Someone who had dedicated so many hours, days, and years of her life to something that no longer was in her future. Looking back on that transition period in m y life now, it seems silly that so much of my identity was rooted in tennis. But it was. Tennis was what I loved. It’s what I worked so hard to excel at. Tennis was my release from life. It taught me how to persevere in the face of defeat, how to be down and literally on the verge of losing an entire match but to not give up because a comeback was always possible if you just believed in yourself and controlled your mentality. Then I had to face life without it. I had to rediscover, to redefine, who I was. And that was a much harder road than I ever dreamed it would be. I went through a major depressive phase. I had numerous pity parties for myself and cried many tears before I finally shook myself out it. I honestly cannot point to a single second in time when the lightbulb came on and I finally began to function again, but I remember deciding that being a college athlete wasn’t in the cards for me, so I was going to focus on my studies and build a future with my brain. It would be years before I realized that my brain was also the wrong foundation for my identity.

We have to jump back a few years to connect my high school identity crisis to my adult revelation that is to come.

There was only one other time in my life when I truly questioned my identity. I lost a dear friend to cancer when I was twelve years old. Mind you, I had accepted Jesus as my Savior when I was seven years old, but to be honest, I didn’t have an active personal relationship with Him until later. I only had a head knowledge at first. I loved learning about all the characters in the Bible, memorizing the stories so that I could win the trivia games we played in Sunday school. I took great pride in being able to name all the books of the Bible. Yet when my dear friend died, I questioned everything I thought I believed in. How could a good God who loved His children let an innocent woman die from cancer? What had she done wrong to deserve to die and leave behind her family? I grappled with these questions and couldn’t reconcile how God could love us enough to die on a cross yet not enough to save my friend from cancer despite all the prayers pleading on her behalf. It seems the hardest lessons in my life take years for me to fully comprehend because it took me years to finally understand and come to peace with my friend’s death. 

God didn’t give my friend cancer. My friend’s sickness and ultimate death (and every person who suffers from cancer or any other illness) are the result of our fallen world - of our own iniquities. Sin exists in this world because we separated ourselves from God in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in direct disobedience to God, resulting in the separation of all mankind from God. Sin entered the world as a consequence of mankind’s disobedience. Sin is why cancer, illness, calamities, tragedy, death, anything not good and holy and righteous, happens on earth. It is not God’s fault; it is the result of our shortcomings. God is a good and faithful God, but He is also just. Mankind had to bear the consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedience and fall from grace. But God still loved each and every human being so much that He sent His only begotten Son to save the world, by offering Himself as a perfect sacrifice on the cross to wash away our sins (John 3:16-17). So while God is just and lets us imperfect humans bear the consequence of our sins, He is faithful and still loves us enough to offer us the opportunity of salvation if we choose to accept Him as our Savior and believe in Him with all of our heart. My friend’s died believing in Jesus. I will see her again one day in Heaven because we share the same faith. Processing my friend’s death was one of the hardest lessons of my life, but I truly believe that God used her passing for good by restoring and building my faith to be what it is today. I am a firm believer that God uses all things to His good (Romans 8:28). Perhaps I would never have reckoned with my frail faith if my friend had not died. By God’s grace, my friend, Ashley, did not die in vein, and I can live with the hope and promise that I will see her again one day.

Warring with my anger and grief forced me to reevaluate my faith and my identity. All those years I spent questioning if I was enough, I was looking for validation in the wrong places. I was seeking acceptance from a world that crucified a perfect person. There was no possible way for me - a VERY imperfect girl - to measure up to enough in a world that has an ever-changing scale of “good enough.” I would be lying if I said I never compare myself to others or ask that age-old question of “am I enough?” But now, I am far quicker at remembering that my value, my worth, my identity is rooted in the fact that I am a child of God. I am imperfect and will always fall short of the glory of God, but my imperfections do not mean that I am any less loved or worthy of love. We are here to love one another because God first loved us (1 John 4:19).