Summer Vibes OnlySample

SET YOUR IDENTITY

As a girl growing up with two older brothers, I trended toward the athletic side. You’d catch me wearing Umbros and a backward hat way before a dress and frilly socks. 

Because of this, people often called me a boy. True story. I once ran into two older gentlemen rocking my backward hat and short bob haircut. They politely said, “Good afternoon, young man.” To which I replied, “I’m a girl!”

At a young age I began to wonder, Should I wear more pink or be worse at sports? Is something wrong with me? What defines if I’m more of a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’?

And that’s the question, isn’t it? You all know that convo has been coming up at cafeteria tables and social media follows. “Am I a boy or a girl? How do I know?”

From my experience as a 7-year-old, Umbro-shorts-wearing, basketball-loving, beating-the-boys-at-whatever-I-could little girl to my current reality as a working, bill-paying, still-basketball-loving, non-pink-wearing young woman, the gender question is not the real question. It is only part of the real question. 

All of humanity — you and me, celebrities we love, teachers and friends — we are all asking a deeper, greater question. What we really want to know is “Who am I?”

We are all looking for the answer to this question. And the only one who can actually provide answers is the one who created us. Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

God made male and female. And so God gets to define gender identity. But even more than that, He gets to (and wants to) define all of our identity. 

God wants to answer every question we have about who we are, why we were made, why we feel the way we do, and how we live in light of it all. Matter of fact, God and those who love Him are the safest people to have that conversation with. 

Take it from an athletic girl who still goes to her Creator when identity issues rise up, and hear this: God did more than save me, He defined every part of who I am. And He still does. 

Respond

• Pray the following: “God, you saw who you created me to be before I became me! Every single moment you are thinking of me. Please God, show me what you think about who I am. Amen.”
• Next, give yourself some time to listen to what God may want to say. Write it down. To talk to someone else who loves Jesus about what you hear.
• Read Romans 3:23. We are all born into sin. But in Jesus, sin no longer defines us.