I’ve been thinking a lot about identity lately.
Not in the deep, candlelit, journal-and-worship-playlist kind of way. More in the “phone won’t stop ringing, someone needs something, when last did I actually breathe” kind of way. The thinking that happens in the gaps, because those are the only gaps I get.
Some days I’m a wife before my eyes are properly open. Then a mother to three very different children who each need a different version of me before we’ve even left the house. Somewhere in there I’m trying to be sharp and present for the career I’m trying to figure out, as if my brain hadn’t already used up half its battery on everyone else. And quietly, underneath all of it, my husband and I are trying to figure out what ministry actually looks like for us, just showing up and serving where we can, and trusting God to make the next step obvious when it’s time. If there’s anything left of me after all that, I try to read something, or write something, just to remember I still have a mind of my own.
That’s a lot to carry before the day has even reached the halfway mark. Most days I genuinely cannot tell which voice in my head is God, which one is anxiety, and which one is just me being tired.
Here’s the part nobody warns you about: at some point I decided I should know who I am by now. I’m not new at this, not new to being a wife, not new to being a mother, not even completely new to church life. So why does it still feel like I’m making it up as I go? Like everyone else got some sort of instruction manual and mine got left at the counter?
That feeling has a name, and I’ve learned to just say it out loud: impostor syndrome. That little voice that says you don’t quite belong where you’re standing, and any minute now someone’s going to notice you’re winging it.
Growth Doesn’t Always Feel Like Arrival
For a long time I thought that voice meant I was in the wrong place. Now I think it might just mean I’m in a new one. Growth rarely feels like arrival. Most of the time it feels like standing in a doorway, one foot in who you used to be, one foot in who you’re still becoming, and no real idea which foot to trust.
Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, God started shifting something in me. Quietly. He tends to do his best work while I’m not paying attention.
I’d always treated identity like something I had to build myself, piece it together out of my achievements, my roles, how well I could hold everything without dropping it or falling apart. If I could just get good enough at all of it, I’d finally feel like I knew who I was.
Identity Is Received, Not Manufactured
But identity was never meant to be manufactured. It’s meant to be received.
Psalm 139 says I am fearfully and wonderfully made — not fearfully and wonderfully self-assembled, thank goodness, because I’d have given up on myself around day three. Before I was a wife or a mother or anything else on my ever-growing list of titles, I was already known. Already named. Already chosen. Everything I do now is built on top of something that was already settled, long before I showed up trying to prove it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. When identity is something you build, every mistake threatens to knock it over. When it’s something you receive, your mistakes don’t get the final word. God does.
That’s been a good thing to remember in the season that I’m in, where not much is certain, and sometimes the dream feels overly ambitious, out of arm’s reach, bigger than anything I actually believe I’m capable of. I used to think I needed to feel qualified before I could call myself called. Turns out that’s not really how it works, and honestly, I take a strange sort of comfort in the fact that I’m not the first person to feel wildly underprepared for what God’s put in front of them.
Look at Moses, arguing with God at the burning bush about his own speech impediment. Look at Gideon, hiding in a winepress when an angel called him a mighty man of valour, which, honestly, is either very funny or very on brand for how God operates. Look at Mary, a teenage girl asked to carry the Saviour of the world with nothing but “let it be” and absolutely no idea how any of it would actually work. None of them felt ready. God called them anyway, then equipped them in the calling, not before it.
There Is Grace in Becoming
I don’t have to have it all figured out – not my role, not the timing, not the shape of what’s ahead before God can use any of it. He’s never once been waiting for me to feel ready. He’s just been asking for my yes, one ordinary day at a time.
So this Women’s Month, as I’ve scrolled past tribute after tribute to women who’ve clearly arrived, the ones with it together, the ones who look like they were handed the manual at birth, I’ve found myself wanting to say something for the rest of us.
Maybe Women’s Month shouldn’t only be for the woman who has arrived. Maybe there’s room to celebrate the woman who’s still becoming. The one whispering “I hope I’m doing this right” over her sleeping kids at night. The one still figuring out her voice, in her marriage and in her calling, and showing up anyway.
I’m somewhere between who I am and who I’m becoming. And for the first time in a while, I think that’s exactly where I’m meant to be.
