Liberate Your Story Podcast

Your identity is in Christ. You are not your own. You belong to Him.

Do those phrases feel familiar? If you come from a Christian-based religion they are likely the tenant of how you know yourself and how you place yourself in the world. These are powerful phrases.

Let me ask you this… do they liberate you? Do they offer you freedom? Ok…one step deeper…do they offer you freedom to be yourself? Or do you have a limit on how much “self” being you are allowed?

I lived the first 40 years of my life having one identity. My identity was in Christ. So what did this one identity hold for me?

Well, if I were to be righteous and pure in the eyes of God, then I would need to know all the facets of who Christ was.
So I spent my entire life, literally my entire life, studying who Christ was.

And then the work in my day, was to live like that.
It was like being handed a script for my behavior, thoughts, desires, and feelings.

Everything that rose to the surface of being me, filtered through the person (or identity) of Christ. If it didn’t fit the identity of Christ, then it would need to go, it couldn’t fit me either.

Even as I say this to you now, I am still in awe at how deeply lost from myself I became.
So why did I not see it as being lost at the time?
I mean, I was taught that we are found in Christ. If you are lost then you need Christ, right?

I didn’t see it, because our identities are built on our beliefs and values.
We won’t actually live contrary to our beliefs and values. If we try, we are in utter conflict with our life, our being.

In episode 5 I talked about how beliefs are our subconscious in play. They operate all the time. Our behavior and decisions are what we do at the conscious level from those beliefs at the subconscious level.

If our beliefs tell us how to see the world, then our values are what matter to us.
Our identities are birthed from those beliefs and values.
Identity is our sense of self, our idea of who we are. We can’t arrive at an identity without our beliefs and values.

So let me circle back now to my identity in Christ.
In order for me to give up any individual identity of myself, I would have to have in place a belief system that allowed space for my highest value to be pleasing God.
And that belief system, then, would be that I was not “of worth” without acceptance or redemption by God.

And if I go one step further, the Christian tenant says that God can not see me without the atoning sacrifice of his son, the Christ.
So, my identity in Christ was about being seen by God only through the filter of his son’s blood atonement.
If I gave it imagery to this, then it would be as if I stood before God covered in the blood of his child. My goal then would be to be as saturated by this blood, this Christ, as I could possibly be.
Less of me. More of him. Does that imagery feel sacrilegious to you?

It can feel like a lot of things but if we follow how beliefs, values, and identity are formed in us, it's just imagery.
But it is imagery that has a profound effect on how we live. We imprint this belief deep within our subconscious and then we live in accordance with it. So my identity ..no longer.. is me.

Fast forward to now.
All your beliefs and practices sit here right in this moment.
Is the conflict of self-identity and Christ’s identity rising up for you?
When I practiced Christianity, we called this the sin nature. It was evil or the “anti” of God rising up.

This would require behavior changes, more contemplation and more learning of who Christ was. It usually involved more sacrifices and letting go of myself, my humanity.
It meant that I was operating from the flesh instead of from the spirit. As if… those two things were separate from each other.

Yikes. I’m saying all the heretical things, aren’t I?

Well, I had denied my own identity for over 40 years and I was no closer to peace than the day I began.
You can not remain in that much conflict with yourself and experience peace.
What I did have… was the decision to ignore the conflict and call THAT act peace.
I would pray for peace daily. I would ask God to reconcile all these conflicts in me and forgive me for doubting.
I don’t know about you, but as I say all of this I’m feeling very sad for the endless, tireless work I did to deny myself and appease a God.

One day I asked myself “who I would be without my identity in Christ?“.
If I was left to myself, what would happen and who would I be?
Would I start hurting people and not care?
Would I become an addict?
Would I sell my soul to the devil?
Would I operate from hate and not love?
Would I steal?

The idea of letting go of my identity in Christ looked like a grave future.
But my future of tireless work to lose myself inside the metaphoric blood of a man, was also feeling quite grave.
I just wanted to know who I might be without all the work. In this belief system within me, there was no worth in my own individual humanity…without Christ.

Thus, “I am not enough” was birthed in the most profound belief about self that one could have.

If all of my value, my worth, my identity was in someone else, then there was no value in being me.

It was a devastating realization. It was a realization that put me on the floor like a thud.
I didn’t get there overnight, but at the moment when I allowed the internal conflict to speak up, then the moment was a thud heard throughout my entire being.

All my seemingly disconnected parts (body, mind, soul) were instantly connected.
All my parts began holding each other, caring for each other, speaking to each other.
My mind learned to listen to my body.
My soul found a mate in my mind.
My being was one.
All in that profound Thud.

I was afraid that I would lose myself in my individual identity, but I actually… was more found than I had ever been.
In this identity, I could choose to love without depending on someone else to make it happen for me. This identity had the choice and freedom to be as expansive as it wanted to be.
And you know….the funny thing is, I never wanted to hurt people, steal, become an addict or sell my soul to the devil.
I had held a belief system so tightly and deeply that going against it was riddled with fears of things that just weren’t going to happen.
Fear kept me small, confined and someone else.

So in our world today, identity is a huge conversation.
For some, it's liberating years of confinement to someone they didn’t connect with.

For others, it's raging a war inside them about what the value of our humanity is actually about.

We are arguing about bathrooms and pronouns as if that’s the problem. Don’t get me wrong, socially we need to evolve to being the kind of humans who can embrace all the identities we are healing into.
But if you are someone who isn’t changing pronouns, changing your identity is profound too.
It costs you something to let go of how you once understood yourself and give permission to yourself to be who you have longed to be.
It is no small thing to remove yourself from a small identity. It’s hard to know how to take up space that wasn’t allowed or offered to you previously..

We are all wrestling with who we are, no matter what beliefs we are operating from. Some of us have a far more public experience of it than others.
But it is no less ground shaking and uprooting.
I lost much of my community, my extended family and way of life.
My values changed.
My beliefs changed.
And my identity finally belonged to me.
I won’t minimize the effects of the different ways our identity changes have on the world either. As a collection of humans that are desiring to stop the inner war of self, we are asking that our world has compassion on our process.
We are seeking love, community and even celebration.

Because shouldn’t freedom be celebrated?

If you are struggling with answering the question “who am I?”... you are wrestling with far more than identity.
You are questioning the deep meaning of your beliefs and their validity in your life.
I look at identity as the “leaking out” of our belief systems. It's usually what we question first, but it's formed by something much deeper within us.

And I say bring it! I’m here for it. Liberation doesn’t come without all the questions and struggles.
The idea that we just one day wake up to it, would be cheating yourself of the honoring work of truly knowing your why for all of it.

If connecting with your identity in authenticity and alignment is calling to you, then…
you will not be alone. You will have me by your side.
You will be loved.
You will be held.
You will be honored.
And you will be enough to be all that you want to be.

Today I honor you for being brave and wanting more of the rich, abundant human that you are! What a beautiful desire to have!

When you liberate your belief systems you will liberate your identity.

Liberate your identity and you liberate your story.