Excepts from Keller on Identity

As humans we need a sense of self that is durable and unchanging and a sense of value and worth.

Western culture – individualism: assigning your own identity.  You have to create and then achieve your own identity.  You are your desires, dreams and choices.  But these desires are often conflicting and changing.  When we take a good thing, such as our work, and make it an identity factor; a justification for our existence.

Quentin: You know, more and more I think that for many years I looked at life like a case at law, a series of proofs. When you’re young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover; then a good father; finally, how wise, or powerful, or what-the-hell-ever. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That I was moving on an upward path toward some elevation, where—God knows what—I would be justified, or even condemned—a verdict anyway. I think now that my disaster really began when I looked up one day—and the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was this endless argument with oneself—this pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench. Which, of course, is another way of saying—despair. (Arthur Miller, After the Fall)

When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see. (Benjamin Nugent)

As a Christian our identity is found in something or someone outside of our selves. It’s found in Him.  “To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out."  John 10:3