I once officiated an outdoor wedding on the slopes of Beaver Creek Ski Resort. My part of the ceremony – a 10 minute sermonette – wasn’t anything special, but I spent nearly the entire reception in a beautiful mountainside lodge fielding more compliments than I deserved. The bride broke away at one point to tell me how impressed everybody was. “Where did you find this guy?” her friends were asking.

I’ll never forget that night, not because I managed to accidentally distinguish myself, but because I didn’t want it to end, and was heartbroken when it did.

I’ve experienced similar moments throughout life, and have spent a mountain of time, energy, and other resources hoping to experience more. Nothing feels better than believing that there’s something special about me, like I matter so much that a hundred people or so will sit glued to their seat, fixated as I share 10 minutes of marriage wisdom that they seemed to never have heard before.

Outside of those moments, I typically don’t feel like I’m anything special, forced to turn to the ages-old identity boost of judging others. If I can’t feel good about myself, the reasoning goes, I can focus on what sucks about everyone else. I might be confused about who I am, but at least I’m not like all the losers who can’t get their act together.

Impressive?

We all struggle with the pain and misguided odyssi that come part and parcel with our search for identity. Typically, we move from “who am I?” briskly into the next question, “what have I done with my life?” At that point, we’re not asking who we are, we’re asking how we’ve distinguished ourselves among other humans, like our identity revolves around the idea that we have to be different and/or better than everyone else.

But I don’t know anyone who’s accomplished something, or a long string of somethings, who walked away considering their quest for identity complete. The answer to “who am I?” is much more powerful than the acquisition of material goods, or lifetime accomplishments, or whatever we pursue in the hopes of defining ourselves.

A few nights ago, during the Oscars ceremony, I watched Brendan Fraser accept the highest award an actor can get. He didn’t see it coming, and had a hard time hiding his reaction to the highest court in the land having declared him the best actor of 2023.

Only one person gets that award each year.

He’s been an actor most of his life, with scores of movies under his belt. His most recent project, a long-shot to say the least, has grossed over $17,000,000 and is among the top 100 movies of 2022/23 – easily the biggest movie he’s ever starred in. Now, an Oscar.

As exciting as all of that must be, whatever identity boost came with it will wear off in time. It might even have some negative consequences.

…even in the unlikely event one attains great wealth or celebrity status, it’s unlikely to provide meaningful satisfaction. Being valued for these distinctions just accentuates the emptiness, insecurity, or self-doubt that pushed one to achieve them.

It’s great to honor the accomplishments of others, especially those in the entertainment industry – I love watching the Oscars – I don’t believe that everyone chases big dreams because of some insecurity.

But too many of us do.

I found this year’s Oscar celebration particularly taxing, with so many happy people standing behind a plexiglass pulpit, pumping their trophy high in the air, preaching about the importance of perseverance – that dreams do come true – failing to mention that there has to be, by definition, people “below” the winners, those who can never “get there,” folks whose dreams of getting an Oscar will never materialize.

What should we tell them about dreams and hard work?

Ultimately, thankfully, their (our) fate is the same as the “winners’.” No matter what we attain, if we answer, “who am I?” with accomplishments, impressive deeds, “dreams come true,” etc., we’ll always be asking.

As someone who’s only recently begun to stop attempting big things in the hopes of finding myself, I have some thoughts about how we might better answer such a tough question. While none of what follows is sexy, or exciting, you’ll be happy to know that, in my opinion, everything we need is sitting, quite literally, under our noses.

The Only You

There are plenty of things that are replicated in our world, over and over again, but you’re not one of them. Your look, your personality, your experiences, friends, abilities, etc., all culminate in something ordained to appear just this once in our universe.

As huge as the cosmos is, it only has the power/will/whatever to create one of you; one time only.

That should put a big dent in your identity confusion.

That’s also why the people who are are closest to you aren’t confused about who you are, or need you to go and accomplish big things before they can define you. That’s also why we love our kids, especially in their younger years, doing little to impress us because that’s not who they are in our eyes.

To the people that love you the most, you’re you, and that’s plenty. If you want to work hard at understanding who you are, do the work of seeing yourself as they do, and ask yourself what gets in the way.

My kids aren’t confused about who I am, neither is my wife. There are certainly others who don’t get me, and I always focus on their opinion for some reason. I have no problem whatsoever agreeing with the people who don’t like me, or seeing myself from their perspective.

If I was healthy, it’d be the other way around.

Magic

Next, you are a formerly single-celled organism that found a way to become the most complex organism in the universe. But that’s everybody. There’s no magic there, or at least none that we’re willing to call magic.

If, however, all of a sudden, I could fly, you’d say “miracle!” until everyone started to fly, then we’d call it “natural,” adjusting our culture and systems to concede yet another miracle that’s not a miracle because everyone can do it.

This is where science, important as it is, gets in the way. We’ve defined so many miraculous things, then dismissed them. Nevermind that our knowledge of this universe is vastly oustripped by our ignorance of it, or that we can’t replicate a flea, much less a single living cell. We’re moving in that direction to be sure – more technological advancements that further incite us to ignore what we don’t know. We’ll always have a mountain of unknowns before us yet still dismiss so many miracles because we found a name for them and convinced ourselves that we know how they work and where they came from.

We are, still, 2-year-olds in a sandbox trying to figure out a universe that’s billions of years old, convinced that we’ve got it mostly figured out. No wonder we can’t answer a simple question like “who am I?”

To understand who/what we are, we’re going to have to stop now and again and acknowledge the utter miracle of human life and the miracle of the cosmic context that cradles it.

Celebration

Again, none of that sounds sexy/powerful/magic/impressive. But that’s not because they’re not impressive, it’s because everyone has the same power, and we didn’t have to do anything to get it, which assaults our deeply rooted sense of what makes someone valuable.

But you can’t get your hands on anything more powerful than the things that will eternally be yours. If those don’t overthrow you, or at least impress you, nothing else is going to work. How could something less powerful – with far less magic – be more effective at securing your identity?

But that leaves us all with a difficult question: how then do we become impressed with what we already are, especially when there are so many dangling carrots promising more?

No idea. At the very least we’ve got some work to do, some values to shift around, and some ages old brain maps to rewire.

But if we don’t want to do the work now, we can do it later, when we’re old, unable to chase big things, or be impressed with what we see in the mirror. Physical appearance, career, accomplishments, abilities, whatever, will then live just beyond our grasp, and the memory of the time that we attained those things won’t bring any peace.

The good news is that the things I mentioned above will still be very much in play, sitting on the shelf where we left them, like a dusty Oscar statue that we’ve ignored forever, waiting for us to embrace them, and finally celebrate.

Without that, whenever it might happen, we’ll never understand who we truly are.

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

It first appeared, politically speaking, in the early ’60s but gained much notoriety after the Michael Brown shooting in 2014 and subsequent attempts from the Black Lives Matter movement to “wake” America to alleged police abuse on a systemic level. Today, “woke” has evolved to represent ideas associated with identity, race, white privilege, reparations, issues related to the trans/queer community, and, in general, liberal politics.

As such, conservative America doesn’t like it, claiming that our country is being overthrown by a political correctness pandemic, that “wokeness” poses a threat to American values and, ultimately, freedom. According to a USA Today poll, the definition of “woke” to more than half of conserviative America is “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” And so phrases like “war on woke” and “woketopians” are commonly used among GOP politicians and influencers.

It’s a war, and pro-woke folk are living in a fairy tale.

To be fair, you have to be careful what you say these days. People are sensitive. Some are too sensitive. It seems like everyone has adopted their own list of forbidden words. You can’t say anything, it seems, and the wrong words can get you in trouble, fired even. A few years ago, a woman lost her job because she socially posted a picture of Michelle Obama without makeup and likened her to a gorilla.

Should somebody lose their job over that? Of course they should. This isn’t a time to articulate racist views on a platform that can viewed by the ENTIRE WORLD. And why does something like that need to be posted? But some believed that it wasn’t a racist perpetration, and that it certainly shouldn’t have gotten anyone fired. To that crowd, it’s just one more example of how the world has gotten too sensitive, lost in political correctness.

But every cultural expression that’s ever existed has had it’s forbidden words: “political correctness” is nothing new to humanity, especially contemporary conservative humanity, especially Christian humanity. I served for 20 years in pastoral ministry and held every church job from janitor to pastor. There are simply things that cannot be said in that world, issues that will not be discussed.

If you’re a conservative Christian, especially one who attends a suburban church in southeast America, I highly recommend that you never go to a Bible study and critique the church, or challenge mainstream interpretations of the Bible, or imply that Donald Trump wasn’t a good president, or talk about how much you love your queer friends, or suggest that churches spend too much money on buildings, or that mostly white churches are mostly white for a reason.

Don’t you dare affirm things like CRT, social justice, Black Lives Matter, or gay wedding cakes. None of that will go well. The farther South you get, and/or the farther away you get from urban spaces, the more trouble you’ll get yourself into.

And when your tribe wants to cancel something, you’d better not put up a fuss, and keep it to yourself that Christianity was doing cancel culture long before anyone else.

I don’t know of a cross-section of Americana that’s free from its sensitive places; topics that must be trodden upon lightly or avoided altogether. The anti-woke movement is no exception. The problem today is that the sensitivities of non-white, non-straight America are coming to the fore – like the world has never seen – and that’s not cool, not because we think they’re illegitimate complaints, but because they’re not the sensitivities of white, straight America.

Funny how someone else’s sensitivities only bother us when they’re not part of our tribe. And when a great big bunch of people start talking about them like they’re legitimate, it frightens us. The concerns of people who don’t think like we do feel evil, so we don’t investigate or consider the idea that they might have some merit.

As such, I don’t have any anti-woke friends who can articulate why I believe that things like Critical Race Theory or the concerns of the Black Lives Matter Movement are legitimate. The mountain of data that converted my thinking on these issues goes largely unconsidered by Americans who see “woke” as the representation of all things evil.

To further complicate things, the woke movement is not free of its shortcomings; it gets overdone at times, as in any movement. And if you want to heavily audit leaders and influencers that are pushing it forward, you’ll find a few bad players. Audit any movement and you’ll find the same, especially if that’s what you’re looking for.

Funny how we always find what we’re looking for.

While nobody should characterize an entire movement by it’s weaknesses, that’s exactly what’s happened with the anti-woke crowd. And if there’s a media outlet who’s majority following is suspicious of wokeness, there’s money to be made, emotions to exploit. Blood in the water. All it has to do is find one bad player, or a misguided perpetration or two, and the entire movement is easily condemned. Serve it up with some less-than-contextual gravy, a bit of ominous music, and a few politicians virtue-signalling for personal gain – like that doesn’t happen on both sides – and boom, it’s truth; further evidence that these people are evil: nobody should listen to them, much less sit and hear their side of the story.

 

Currently, 56% of America believes that “woke” means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” I’ll wager that, as these injustices become more difficult to ignore, more Americans will adopt a similar definition. But, as in all of America’s formative social justice movements, there will be a cross-section of us that simply won’t be able to get there.

Many will be Christian, refusing to believe that God might be working behind these movements, doing his part to move our country in the direction it needs to go.

To the Christian anti-woke crowd, the idea that God is pro-woke is anathema.

Everyone has triggers.

We’ve all been mishandled, multiple times. The resultant wounds – the ones that haven’t yet managed to heal – cause visceral pain when someone steps on them. When you pull my triggers, I’ll feel something similar to what I’d feel if you punched me in the face.

My first reaction will be to punch back, figuratively speaking.

And there is nobody more qualified at or passionate about pulling my triggers like the small humans I’ve committed to. These kids have assaulted my triggers like no one else.

For example, I struggle when someone disrespects me. In my early teen years, there were no shortage of bullies and popular people who went out of their way for whatever reason to make me feel like garbage. I’d go to bed most nights worrying about how I’d get through the next day.

I now realize that these poor kids were dealing with their own abusive situations, and I was selected at random to pay the bill. I wasn’t the problem, nor was I worthy of such abuse, but the wounds remain, unhealed, waiting to be stepped on.

When one of my kids decides that disrespect is the best way forward, a deep, very longstanding trigger gets pulled.

I get confused in those moments, struggling to realize that I’m actually not being attacked, or that the trigger-puller doesn’t pose some kind of threat. Sometimes, I manage to slow down, or excuse myself into some private space to reframe things. Or I fight back, not physically of course, but in a way that most parents respond when they’re triggered: super long, shame-based lectures; a raised voice; overly harsh consequences; inappropriate distance; etc.

Retaliation.

All of this to ensure that my kids are endowed with their own triggers when they hit adulthood.

It’s helpful, however, to know that I’m not actually mad at my kids when I get triggered. I’m mad at something else, something older than they are, almost completely unrelated to them or their alleged misdeeds.

Ultimately, I don’t have to be a bond servant to these unhealed places, and my kids don’t have to be victims of them.

I do manage, from time to time, some healthy parenting, I’ll call it “discipline” here, and it looks much different than my triggery moments. I’ve come to learn – with much trial and error, and many mistakes –  what works; for example:

• • • Discipline kids when they’re not triggered/angry/unresponsive
    • Discipline kids when I’m not triggered
    • Spend time connecting in ways that are meaningful to them
    • Remind them that they’re breaking their rules, not mine
    • Deploy consequences that move them forward

Healthy discipline is the exact opposite of triggery parenting: it has little to do with me, and everything to do with helping kids become better versions of themselves. I don’t always do it right, but the more I come at it from a place of care and concern, the more I learn about what these kids really need.

Triggery parenting is soooo much easier, in the short run at least. It requires no emotional energy, no advice/intervention from others, no study, no humility, no pain, and in general, no work. It looks like parenting, sort of, and it feels good, like we’re doing what we’re supposed to do – what our parents did – and, simultaneously enables us to tell those little f@%$ers where they can put it.

Discipline-based parenting requires the bearer to face his triggers, and there’s no way to do that without facing the pain that put them there. The internet is full of advice here, all in agreement on one thing: if you’re going to begin working on your triggers, it’s going to be difficult, and its going to hurt.

At the end of that is freedom of course; not just freedom for our kids, but a corresponding level of personal abolition from the fear and pain that lies underneath our deepest hurts.

Sadly, I’m not qualified to speak about the healing process. I’ve been to therapy many times to discuss my wounds, and not much has happened to them. I’ll most likely take them to my grave.

But It’s been helpful to name a few, to see how they affect my closest relationships, and to realize that the fear that they cause isn’t actually real; I don’t have to worry about being disrespected, or cheated, or shamed.

And its fascinating to reflect on the world that my mental/emotional wounds create when they’re triggered, unreal as it is

When my kids traipse into these sensitive spots, all I have to do is take a moment to think about what’s really happening. They’re little more than little humans, with scant experience of this world, pushing boundaries like any healthy little human should do, and dealing with desires that are much bigger than they are.

When they set themselves on an unhealthy trajectory – one that’s sure to make them a miserable adult – I’d like to respond in ways that put them back on a more human path.

Triggers can’t do that.