Strategy 8: Realize Your Identity

Hi everyone! I’m Carol Diane and THIS is Happiness Reclaimed. You were born for the pursuit of happiness which means rising toward your potential mentally, physically, and spiritually, living a life of love with deep meaning and purpose. We’re leaving behind the  emotional stress, bad health, and empty spirituality of today, to practice powerful life strategies in a mind-body-spirit approach to wellness. It’s time to reclaim your life. Let’s go.

Today we’re covering Powerful Strategy #8, Realize Your Identity. As always, everything I say is for educational purposes only and at no time am I telling you what to do in a specific situation. Only you can decide what’s right for you in a given moment. Your participation in any way with the Happiness Reclaimed organization signifies your understanding of, and agreement with, these terms.

Realizing Your Identity is a lifelong process.

I’ve learned the hard way that we can all be filled with self-hatred or at least self-condemnation and low self-worth and not even know it. It’s not until we start to heal spiritually that we realize how much we’ve changed and how much better we feel. I just ask that you keep your mind open to new possibilities for yourself. 

The phrase “Realize Your Identity” means we see ourselves as valuable children of God, made in God’s image—of great worth, loved and treasured by God but not spared from challenges and problems. 

Because we are on a heroic journey, there WILL BE challenges and problems, but we won’t choose to shrink back in fear, refusing to take up our heroic journey. Instead, we move forward, and prepare ourselves for the challenges, disappointments and heartaches. If we try to run and hide, things will actually be worse in the long run. Our hiding place becomes a dangerous trap, a place of depression and quiet desperation. 

So, we might as well take the world on, and have our great adventure on our own terms.  

We should also remember that these challenges we face voluntarily help us to grow stronger and stronger as we persist and keep going no matter what. We are moving into our call to greatness.   

That will look different for each of us. We are unique and we must honor the Creator by being what WE are meant to be, not what someone else is meant to be. Figuring that out is is a challenge sometimes, but it can be done. And God is there to help us. And you will probably develop several different answers throughout your lifetime. There are different seasons in life, and we can change as time goes by. And that variety is good.

Now this strategy, Realize Your Identity, is tightly linked with Strategy #7, Embrace Your Humanity. It might be a chicken-or-egg argument as to which happens first—do we see our flaws and mistakes first, and then realize God love us despite those, or is it the case that we can finally face our flaws and mistakes because we feel just enough of God’s love to start seeing the painful truth? Or is it both simultaneously? I don’t know and I don’t have much interest in philosophical discussions or arguments like that. I just know the two concepts are tightly linked, so it probably helps us if we work on both simultaneously for maximum personal improvement. 

This connection between the repentance and the feeling of God’s love is demonstrated in our song quotation for today, which comes from a song from the band Sidewalk Prophets, called “You Love Me Anyway.” The quotation is: 

I am the thorn in your crown
But You love me anyway
I am the sweat from Your brow
But You love me anyway
I am the nail in Your wrist
But You love me anyway
I am Judas’ kiss
But You love me anyway.

To better understand those references it helps to know the story of what happened to Jesus, but even if you have no Biblical knowledge at all, I’m guessing you can get the gist of the lyrics.

I will admit to you that for most of my life I would react to an idea like what that song expresses like this: “I wasn’t there causing Jesus to be crucified! I didn’t cause him any trouble or nail him to the cross. I never betrayed him the way Judas did. Don’t blame me.”

And I think I had that reaction for two reasons:

1. I’d received a lot of criticism and condemnation from some in my past and so I became understandably resistant to anything that felt like unfair criticism or an unfair putdown.  After all, it is true that I was not alive or present when Jesus was crucified.

2. But Reason #2 was, I was taking ideas like those song lyrics too literally. Those song lyrics express a metaphorical idea, which is that we ALL fall short of the glory of God. We all have our thoughtless moments, our unkind moments, our angry, vengeful moments, our moments where we might betray someone, fail to stand up for what’s right, turn on someone with harsh condemnation or behave in other ugly ways.

So as I’ve grown spiritually, I’ve started to better see and feel the metaphorical truth—that our failures to live up to our calling in this modern day ARE, in essence, just like that. We’re talking about how, as time goes by, we can be more and more honest with ourselves and realize how we’re guilty of what we thought only other people were guilty of. Open your eyes and you’ll start to notice how you can be guilty of the same thing you criticize others for, maybe not to the same degree, maybe in a completely different setting in life, but if we live long enough and open our eyes, we start to notice some humbling examples. And that new realization not only helps us to grant others grace, but also it connects us more closely to the REAL TRUTH in life, which is always a good thing. 

But the good news is, even with our faults and failings, we can realize God loves us anyway. The more we accurately see the ugly things that we are forgiven for, the more loved we feel. It’s one of those great ironies in life that I refer to in my book Happiness Reclaimed. It’s counterintuitive but it’s true.  

Once people understand God loves them EVEN WITH their ugly parts, they can escape their self-condemnation, grant mercy and grace first to themselves and then to others. But without that transformation that comes from feeling God’s love, true peace and affection hang out of reach in our human relationships. 

And the Bible is full of good news like that, and it’s filled with what today we might call “positive affirmations.” When you step into faith, you get to rest and find encouragement in statements like this: 

• I am not my past: I am a new creation. Leave all that condemnation and self-condemnation behind.
• I am more than a conqueror.
• I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
• I am filled with the Holy Spirit of God.
• I am never alone.

 And so many more.

So to close for now, I’ll repeat what I said in the Strategy No 7 podcast—we’re just getting started in our understanding of this idea. It’s really a lifelong effort in some ways, getting our heads on straight, leaving behind our old mental programming. I’m sure you already know how we have our mental ups and downs, and sometimes we move one step forward and some days we move two steps backward. That’s okay. It’s a growth process. But we can spiral upwards into a better and better life, with greater and greater spiritual enlightenment, where all of this gradually makes more and more sense. It’s a journey, an exciting one.

Be sure to check out the Links page of my website HappinessReclaimed.com, for all kinds of materials that will help you learn more. And my favorite songs are there too. Plus, my book Happiness Reclaimed will be extremely helpful, too, and lays so much of the groundwork for you.

Please like, share and subscribe so that you don’t miss a single episode, and so that others you know can hear this as well. 

If you have any questions at all, please contact me at HappinessReclaimed.com. I’ll try to answer those questions in a future broadcast. So that’s it for today. Love ya guys.