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Putting final touches on a talk about identity for meeting at @IDCRaleigh later this week & once again struck by how much the digital age & social media warps & oppresses our sense of self
Everything is DIY any more: baking, interior design, home repairs, finances, education, theology... identity formation
We live in a time of self-creation where weight of identity rests on individual. Who do you want to be? What are your dreams & how are you going to fulfill them? How are you going to change the world?!? It's exhausting.
And b/c we can google everything, we have this false sense of limitlessness, of omniscience, omnipresence, & omnipotence. We believe we can self-create b/c it *feels* like we have the capacity to do it.
Digital age also rewards entrepreneurial spirit. It rewards & celebrates the "self-made" man and woman while hiding the things that made them successful behind the curtain. It looks like *magic.*
And so self-creation & success becomes the standard rather than the outlier. After all, if SHE can do it, why can't you? Girl, the missing piece must be YOU. So just get your act together & live the life you were *meant* to live. The one you create for yourself.
But people don't create themselves. From birth to death, we control very little about our lives. Certainly, we act with agency & power, but our choices are boundaried by the hand of Providence. Our lives are given to us, gifts from a good God.
We steward these lives in submission to him & love for others. But we don't have to make ourselves. We are walking paths that He has already cut for us. We are entering into the good works that He has ordained.
