IDENTITY

What makes up your identity?  Yesterday on MPR I was listening to a program on underemployed people.  During the course of the conversation between the program anchor and the professionals involved it was stated that in our country, the United States, “we are what job we have”.  I stopped the cleaning I was doing and stood for a few moments letting that statement settle itself within my brain. 

I knew exactly what was being talked about because it was one of the disturbing emotional things that happened to me after I was laid off from my 10-year position working with the homeless.  I found myself questioning more and more “Who am I without a professional job?”  I had lost the relationships with my clients that I had cherished so.  I had lost the professional committees that I had been a part of and the relationships that came with those, and I had lost the conversations and challenges of days filled with schedules and justice issues and ministerial practices.  I found myself left with a quiet home, unending house chores, and a sadness that was increasing as the “thank you, no thank you” letters came in or as I waited for letters or contacts that never arrived.  I began to realize that I had bought into this systematic portrayal of identity and needed to search for the Truth.

In my search for God’s Truth, since His is the final Truth of our existence, I discovered that I had to take off the cloak of professionalism; in fact, I had to strip down to my creation in His eyes.  Scripture tells us that we are “known” before we are born and I began to wonder who it was that He had formed me to be.  My spiritual sense acknowledged to me that I had to venture that deeply to unmask what secular thinking had given me.  Just as the U.S. banking system has had to reevaluate its mission, motives, and procedures so did I.  What I discovered was the need to do some cleaning of the “stink’n think’n” that had settled on my shoulders that comes with the propaganda of selling the “need” for professionalism as the ultimate saving grace to the American people.  Whether or not we do our jobs well seems to have been developed into a commodity when originally in the dignity of my creation my professionalism is the care and respect that I show others, the care and respect I give to the “work” that I do that helps provide for my needs and the needs of my community, and the care and respect I show as steward of God’s creations.  Professional behavior just stands for educated, ethical behavior.  It says more about the attainment of knowledge that leads one to be able to maneuver through the expectations of a particular cultural system than it does about the person attaining it.

To re-discover my identity I had to take a look at my autobiography.  Where did I come from?  Who was my family?  What had impacted my life along the journey I have taken?  I needed to see that being a professional was only a part of my life.  I was also a daughter, a sister, a Christian, a friend, an aunt, a mother, a wife, a Nana, and someone who has always been drawn to knowledge.  Asking “why?” has been one of my lifelong mantras.  In doing this my life themes began to emerge and I was drawn out of the depression of having lost my identity and drawn within the wonder of where else it was that God had wanted me to journey to. 

Having to look deeper at my own identity has been a gift from God.  He has given me insight into myself and into what many other unemployed and underemployed individuals could benefit from doing.  Also, I have found myself drawn towards the depression felt by so many of our country’s senior citizens who also feel the loss of their identity as they retire and have their fill of relaxation and never ending entertainment.  Maybe the next part of my journey will be with them.  If I find employment seeking the wisdom of our beautiful elders, I will once again be a professional.  If I sit among them doing what they may need me to do but do not receive pay, I will not.  Ultimately I have chosen to be God’s daughter and look to Him for I will be able to maneuver in and out of these positions and never lose a bit of my identity.