Summer is a great opportunity for getting this question right. Let me explain.
Go to any party or get into a conversation with a stranger and before long they will ask “What do you do?” Most people respond, “I’m a teacher, ‘I’m a plumber’, ‘I’m a software engineer.’ When asked what we do, we reply with what our job is.
For men especially, the question is often an attempt to place our new acquaintance on the social pecking order. The ‘What do you do?’ question has at it’s roots our need for status and value.
Nick Page recounts in his book ‘The Dark Night of the Shed’ … “I met a guy the other day…[he] worked with creating sustainable communities, but our whole conversation- and I use the word loosely- consisted of him asking me questions to which he already knew the answer, but I didn’t. It was more like an interview, or the weirdest pub quiz ever. Every time I ventured an opinion, he shook his head and said, “No, I’ll tell you what it is….” Every unanswerable question was about his job. When I tried to ask him about himself, he wasn’t interested.”
Who are you? Such is the importance of our work or our role in life that we can become completely defined by it. But I am not my job. That is just something I do. It matters and it’s important, but it could go away tomorrow and I would still be here. We are not what we do. We are not what we own. We are not what we look like. We are not our successes or failures. We are not what we have done, or what has been done to us. These are things that our culture uses to define us, but not God.
Jesus met a woman at a well, (John 4) and after is conversation with her, she exclaimed to her neighbours ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done!’ Her neighbours already knew what she had done and had made up their minds about her a long time ago. But not Jesus. He saw beyond what she did, to the real person underneath. He saw one of God’s children, dearly loved and valued.
Holidays are often referred to as ‘getting away from it all’ and when you do just that, you’re in a much better place to answer the question ‘Who am I?’ I hope you come up with a better answer than your job description.
