Come with me. Take my hand. Let us take a walk along the corridors of the innermost parts of your being. Let the mirror of identity that adorns the wall reflect to you, your very essence. Tell me who you see? As I sit here and write, I can’t help but reflect on what a month it has been. Life is a funny thing. You can be flying high one second and crashing the next. Disoriented from the force of impact as you make contact with the earth, good habits that have been painstakingly built over time suddenly become at risk of being eroded overnight—I’ve always wondered why it takes a lifetime to build and seconds to destroy… but I digress. Life! She can be a whimsical witch from the west if I ever did know one.
In those moments of crash-landing with knees scarred and elbows bruised, the temptation to lie down and succumb to the pain can be quite alluring. The energy needed to take on each new day is absent, keeping out of sight like a guilty toddler. This is what the last 31 days have been like for me. As I slowly start to emerge from the dust and rubble, I can’t help but ponder on a few things. For one, I’m disappointed in myself that I took so long to dust myself off. I’m a person who prides himself on having good mental fortitude. I train myself to find perspective in every bad situation. I tell myself that life is happening for me, not to me. I remind myself of the words of Les Brown: “when things go left, don’t go with them”. So why did I go left this time? Why has it taken me so long to find my center again? This leads me to my first point: sometimes no matter how much you mentally prepare for life’s valleys, you can not completely escape human nature. Certain situations will still deal a heavy blow. Maybe the focus should be less on how long it took you to dust yourself off, and more on the fact that at the end of the day you stayed true to who you profess to be and refused to remain in the rubble.
This brings me to my next thought—knowing your identity is extremely, unequivocally important! What do we mean when we say identity anyways? Are we because we do, or are we, therefore we do? Ponder on that for a bit. For me, I believe in the latter. In other words, identity has to be formed in a vacuum.. void of the influence of circumstance or environment. With that identity forged, the challenge then becomes to live true to it. There is no place more critical for you to remember and live out your identity than when you find yourself left of center… when the bruised bones from crash-landing present a challenge to getting back up. If you will do anything worthwhile in life, you must hold yourself accountable to your identity. To have, you must do. To do, you must be! Someone who wants to have a published book is not a writer because he has a published book. He writes because HE IS a writer. When he writes (to do), he will HAVE a book.
So as we stand here in the corridors of your innermost self, I ask you again… tell me who you see? For me I see a man who has made a promise to himself to live life to the fullest, in the valley or on the mountain. I see a man who will constantly seek to exhaust EVERY God given gift within, in a quest to be a blessing to others. I see a man, win or lose, who will always find his way back to center.