About 15 years ago, approaching 40, my hope took a nosedive. It seemed to occur overnight. Suddenly having taken an honest look at my life, I was distraught with how little I’d achieved, what little difference I’d made. My crisis was, what did my life even mean or stand for?
I was recently remarried and was still quite idealistic—my then new wife didn’t know who she’d married for a while. My career was at a crossroad, many of my most important relationships were in flux, my expectations were being right-sized, and I just faced a huge season of humiliating doubt.
I wasn’t the person I’d thought I was.
I wasn’t needed in the ways I wanted to be needed.
I faced so many shocks to my inner core.
It was excruciating. I’d lost confidence in who I was and found this translated in my being unable to do even the simplest things well.
I’d forgotten a lot of things. I’d forgotten that only three years earlier I’d received the call from God to be a minister, to devote the rest of my life to service. I’d forgotten that I was a father and that I was performing well. I’d forgotten it was okay to be imperfect and to not have my life altogether. I’d forgotten I was loved. I’d forgotten my life was enough. I’d forgotten I was enough.
For a time, we face these inevitable identity crises. It’s like all our insight—all our vision for truth—disappears. We’re blinded to the realities of the good things we’ve done and the values we represent.
The truth is all truth-seekers will enter times of inevitable identity crisis.
As truth-seekers, we’ll be challenged to dig deeper to find the truth we need to know to reconcile our crisis.
The identity crisis will take us to a deeper version of ourselves.
One thing we ought to really cling to is the eternality of hope when there’s no scaffold of external hope left. In fact, it’s when we’ve got nothing left in our external world to cling to that we go deeper inside to the eternal truth that otherwise sits dormant there to set us truly free.
“In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human success, but rather on how much we loved.”
—Saint John of the Cross
We can very often think of ourselves as failures when we see how much others have or the successes they’ve achieved or are achieving, or the influence they’ve had—or have. For how much other people are honoured and revered and valued on earth when we aren’t. We can feel we missed out, and even that people might have a particular negative perception of us.
But how important are these things on the eternal stage?
Clearly, our priorities are upside down to where they need to be, but of course it’s human to crave what the human heart seeks, and we can understand we crave what the world values—possessions, performance, popularity. What the world values is always in our face.
So we can understand it when we’re hard on ourselves.
Indeed this is the first step in coming to grips with the truly important things of life—the love we sow into our relationships that may very often not be returned to us; the times we receive ill for the good we sow; the suffering that comes our way for our acceptance of the things we cannot change; bearing the occasional humiliation that our efforts aren’t rewarded.
When all is said and done, if we love and yet fail, we have not failed, we’ve succeeded. And more to the point, we’re seen!
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