Charlotte Scanlon-Gambill challenges us to look at who we are

Charlotte Scanlon-Gambill

Over recent years I have realised like never before that 'identity' is a big issue; it is at the core of our happiness and fruitfulness in life. People who really know who they are, both as a person and as a Believer, live their lives to the full and make the greatest impact on others. And that should be everyone - including you!

My new book Identity has just been released and this article is based on extracts from the first section:

Let the Journey begin

I believe there is a journey we all must embark upon. It's a journey that some people may never ever take, or even be aware of its existence. For others, it's a journey that they feel is too personal to talk about. It is the journey of discovering who you really are.

This journey confronts you with the question, 'Who Am I?' and demands that you move beyond answering it with any title, label or role that you currently fulfil in life. If your answer to this question would be couched in the terms of a clinical job description, or an explanation of what you currently do in life, then this is a tell tale sign that maybe for you the journey has not yet begun.

This journey makes you really think about what makes you unique; it makes you think about what God has placed in your life that sets you apart from everyone else. It will cause you to examine what makes you stand out from the crowd and makes you different. It's not necessarily an easy journey to take because what you discover may make demands on you that are hard to follow through. It may call for you to make some changes to things like your career, relationships and in general, could re-route your life.

Remove the Stabilisers

When you were young, did you ever learn to ride a bicycle with the help of stabilisers, or training wheels as they are sometimes called? If so, you will understand that they had the capacity to fool you into thinking that you could ride confidently and had mastered the skill of bicycle riding, only to discover later that you couldn't! All along you had been protected and stabilised by the training wheels. But one day the stabilisers were taken off and as you began to wobble, fall off, graze your leg, get back on and wobble some more, you realised that the hard work of learning to ride by yourself had only just started because the support that had kept you upright was gone. This is what it's like when we set off on the journey to discover who we really are.

At thirty three years of age I am on that journey. I thought I knew who I was but over the past few years I began to realise that in some areas I still had my stabilisers on. I hadn't even begun to try and let the real me come to the surface and remove the support I was so heavily resting upon.

I had to face the fact that if I started to remove some of my stabilisers I would have to risk people seeing the real me. Inside myself I had a battle going on, I knew it was the right thing to do but I didn't want other people to see me wobble and take a tumble; I didn't want them to see me careering along feeling out of control. I thought I was a confident rider, yet my confidence in some areas was in the training wheels and if I was to continue with my journey I had to let them go.

I now realise that this journey of identity is a life-long one which I must be thorough about if I am to discover who I am. This has meant that in areas of my life I have had to detach from people, comforts, and securities that were acting as my spiritual stabilisers. Since then I have fallen off my 'bike' a few times, I have grazed my knee and made mistakes along the way, but now I can confidently say I have found my balance and am learning how to ride in my own right.

The first time you set off without the familiar training wheels, it can be daunting, you can end up worrying about the wobbles that lie ahead. But once you realise they are part of what God intends you to go through, instead of fearing them you can begin to embrace them.

So, wherever you are at, whether you have already started your journey of identity, or whether you were never aware of it before, I want to challenge you to look intently at your life and be willing to ask the question, 'Who am I?'