Attitude of Service - Who Am I? Who are You?
If there is a book seller nearby, it would not be uncommon to find me checking for new titles in the ‘Leadership’ aisle. On this occasion, I was in the bookstore at the Glen Eyrie Conference Center near Colorado Springs. An employee heard that I had read one of the books that they proffer and was interested in hearing what I thought. As I completed my impromptu review, a nearby customer made eye contact and pulled me aside. She had been eavesdropping on my conversation with the staffer. She wanted to probe a little more.
I don’t remember the customer’s name, Anita, I think. In my “review” she overheard me offer some advice -- a challenge -- to the bookstore employee. It is not new advice – in my role as mentor I have used it as a tool many times over the years. In different flavors, the advice has appeared in countless articles and books, including the topic book of my in-aisle review. In fact, the advice is almost so fundamental that it is really not advice, at all.
​God made only one of you. And for a specific Purpose. And with no one else to fulfill His intended Purpose for you, but you. Have you ever meditated on WHAT that Purpose might be? Have you peeled back the layers of your onion and tried to document what is in there? Quantifying what makes you YOU is a great way to begin your journey to more fully understanding what God’s Purpose might be for you. You cannot operate on the assumption you are gifted in ways that are not from God. If you don't deeply know who and what you are, how do you know if you are being what God has called you to be? Write it out. It is a great exercise. Can you define yourself?
Who are you? “What makes you, YOU?” It's a great question. It stimulates self-discovery and inner understanding. If you were without a professional career and a job title, how would you describe YOU? Can you describe yourself in detail without reference to your current or past career?
Spiritual Gifts are unlimited. If that is true (and I believe that it is), it means the random combination of any selection of Gifts must be pretty unique. But the Gifts you have been blessed with are certainly not random, they are divine. Combine your personal assortment of Gifts with your own degrees of temperament, passion, and drive, and you should begin to understand how unique to God that you truly are. And how perfectly special His Purpose for someone with precisely that set of Gifts is to Him. Aligning yourself with that Purpose will rise from your understanding of what makes you tick -- what God has created in you.
I began the exercise in January 2005 -- it was a New Year's resolution, of sorts. “What makes me, me?” I started by taking several of the more common self tests and assessment tools that are out there. I really liked StrengthsFinder 2.0, but any of them will get you started in understanding yourself, even if you don't agree with the assessment's outcome.
It was slow going at first. But with the help of Microsoft WORD, I was excited to have fully defined myself in three compact thoughts. “Exercise done!” I thought. Proudly, I printed my accomplishment and pinned it in the center of the overburdened bulletin board that hangs above my desk. There it was held by a neon, red thumbtack.
It was not even a few weeks later when I caught myself staring at the brevity of words on that nearly blank sheet of letter-sized paper. It was mostly white-space. "There must be some things that I left out," I mumbled with my forehead crinkled to one side. Quickly, I scribbled two bullet points to the bottom of my short paragraph. “Now, we’re done!” Life goes on, I thought.
But I would find myself reflecting on that printout at least monthly over the next year, always adding, editing, and scratching out words and even whole sentences at times. As I would work at my desk, my eyes kept getting drawn to the whiteness of that sheet of paper suspended in place by the neon, red thumbtack. For a while, addition was more common than subtraction. At one point my short list had grown to more than twenty-five items.
Some entries (and deletions) came by the Holy Spirit. Some came from friends and colleagues who would insist, “Ken, would you help me with this, you are so good at…,” and that conversation would lead to another scribbled entry on my list. Some thoughts I would erase only to add again down-the-road. I began to realize that this was not as easy-peasey an exercise as I had originally thought. I had to be careful to not add "things" that I wanted to be, and to challenge myself to make my self-rendering as honest as possible. It was illuminating to me when I was convicted to remove things from the list that had been consciously added earlier.
Over the next several years I managed to revisit and re-type “Who Am I?” a dozen or more times. In the end, I realized, the edits I was making were becoming smaller and seemingly less significant -- often just typographical. Eventually I would review the list and be convinced. It had been reviewed, rewritten, rehashed, and revised to about fifteen bullet point items – a full sentence was nowhere to be found. Then I changed the tense so that the list did not appear historic, but appeared to me as list of contemporary, personal, daily challenges.
The list still resides on my bulletin board, which is now above my desk in our motorhome. I still look at it regularly. Like a suit of armor at the entry to a castle, at one point in time I had even placed it on my LinkedIn page. There have not been any changes in more than five or six years, now. I think I am happy with who I am, in more than one sense. I even managed to include a bit of witless humor that seems to punctuate so many days’ fun for me.
My style was to define myself in the form of a corporate 'To Do List' with check-off boxes as the lead column. For you it may be paragraphs and colorful stories. I read once that someone illustrated who they were with carefully selected photos in an album. Another person created their mini-bio as a flowchart with branches off this direction and that pointing to cleverly detailed sub-categories. As unique as you are, so won’t your response be to this exercise.
The investment of time and thought that I put into the challenge paid-off in thought-provoking revelation. Because of the value I received through the process, I now freely challenge others as I did with the staffer at Glen Eyrie, and with Anita. Personally, I wish that I had started the exploration earlier in my life so that I could have watched it change as I moved through the seasons of my life. As it was, it took almost five years for the list to settle down and make comfortable sense to me.
Do you remember the parable of the talents? It is in this story that Jesus tells us that we will be held accountable for what God has gifted us, and not for what other people expect from us. While we are not all given the same gifts, or the same number of gifts, we are expected to know what we were given and to find ways to apply those gifts wisely. If we do not, God will take the gift away. Who wants that?!?
For God’s glory, He made me who and what I am, and whom I am not. I understand that now. And I have a much clearer picture of my Purpose for having taken my own advice and worked through the adventure.