Learning to 'be me' in Christ

My family billeted a group of young adults at our house for one night this month. Because I didn’t know any of them, I was afraid that I would be rejected and I felt very shy and insecure inside.

During the evening I went down to the basement to get something, and as I walked, I asked Jesus to help me be myself around them. I heard His voice speak very clearly in my heart.

“Just be me,” He said.

I stopped in my tracks. I was not expecting to hear this answer.

“Just be myself, you mean?” I said back to Him.

“No,” He replied. “Be me. Be my hands and my feet. Be my ears and my eyes. Speak my words. Be me.”

He didn’t offer a fall-back plan to me. He didn’t say, “And if you do all this, you will 100 per cent be liked and popular, money-back guarantee.” He just told me what to do. At first, I felt weird inside. I had asked Him to help me be me. But He told me to be me in Him, so I thought I would have to adopt a new personality or something. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted our guests to see how funny and interesting I was, and to like me for me. But I learned that my best me would be me in Him and that gave me peace. This was a huge lesson in humility.

I had mistakenly thought that my happiness would come from establishing my identity apart from Jesus. St. Paul acknowledged this problem in his address to the people of Athens. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” he said (Acts 17:28). It takes humility to know that we cannot “live and move and have our being” without God. He designed us that way.

A wise man once told me what he considered the definition of humility. “Humility,” he said, “is when you know who you are — and you don’t exaggerate who you are, either to the better or the worse.” If we exaggerate who we are to the better, like trying to make ourselves look better in front of others, we are unfortunately displaying our insecurities. When we exaggerate who we are to the worse, we are calling out for attention in the hopes others will raise us up — again, displaying our insecurities.

We are all insecure, to a point, so how do we become truly confident? By trusting God.

Confidence can come from the fact that God loves us unconditionally, despite ourselves and our insecurities. We are loved, no matter what anyone says. We are truly confident when we see ourselves through God’s eyes. Humility comes from the fact that we, and every person on Earth, have our strengths and weaknesses, and we are loved by God just the way we are. He still calls us to growth, but He loves us in the process.

I think I’ve got my socks on straight now — all my thinking didn’t go for nothing! In the end, I think there are two things we should know about humility.

 Humility is not just putting yourself forward vulnerably and without pretension, but instead being yourself, in Christ. And to be humble, we have to discover how much we’re loved by God for who we are.

(Richard, 15, is a Grade 11 home-schooled student in Winnipeg.)