Who do you think you are? I've discovered that that question has a lot of answers depending on what mood you're in or a particular scenario you're describing. Of course, it can always be answered by listing the roles you play--mother, father, sister, brother; or boss, employee, owner; or friend, neighbor, acquaintance. You can think of some others.
Robert Fulghum of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten fame (great little book if you haven't read it), said in another one of his books that one of the first question we ask one another when we're getting acquainted is What do you do? He says that he likes to answer it according to what he has been doing most recently. If he was cleaning house, he tells people that he is a janitor. He said something similar to a woman on a plane while he was flying to give a talk in a church on the west coast. Later, as he was speaking, he looked out in the audience and there she was. [It was on Fire When I Lay Down On It]
Anyway, the point is that it is a deeply personal question--Who do you think you are? I have an answer to suggest. It's actually going to be the topic of my sermon this week. I don't know if you've ever realized it or not, but each of us is the answer to someone's prayer...maybe a lot of peoples' prayers throughout our lifetime.
Sound a little outrageous? It's not. Sometimes unknowingly we give just the right answer to someone who has been in a time of confusion or we offer support when someone has been feeling alone or we are in just the right place at the right time to help somebody in an emergency. There are several situations where this applies. When things are operating with true synchronicity, we are each playing the perfect role, undefined by social labels.
Maybe what each of us should think about as we go about our daily lives is serving one another as if we might be the answer to their prayer that day.
Hopefully the answer is "yes".
ReplyDeleteThat was a great thought! I honestly never thought of myself as the answer to anyone's prayers. It's an uplifting thought!
ReplyDeleteI wasn't there when the conversation occurred, years ago, but I once heard that you told someone something like: you were confident that I had a theology, but only I knew what it was. (That's always been one of my favorite things I ever learned, second-hand, that someone had said about me.)
ReplyDeleteThe answer to the "Who are you?" question seems kinda like that. Maybe everybody knows instinctively who they are -- but the instinct keeps getting overlaid with other cruft: who other people think they are, who they think they should be, and so on. It's only when they know that they know who they are that they really become who they are (which implies, as you say, who they can be for somebody else).
Which boils down (maybe) to the same answer from an earlier commenter: yes. Ha!
P.S. Of course, if you keep thinking this way, a lot of people are going to leave church on Sunday scratching their heads.
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