Be Yourself!

One afternoon at the campus of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in beautiful small town, South Hamilton, I was sitting in front of my professor, Steve Kang.  During sitting in Professor Kang’s office, my mind was pondering over many things after he made stunning statement:

“During your stay around here, I wanted you to know God just wanted you to be YOU!”

This statement above made me feels like brick just hit my nose so hard and caused to bleed badly!  It is because I told Professor Kang with an assumption as I said, “I believed God called me to be pastor or teacher…”  Professor Kang cut me off and said this statement above.

For years, I lived in people’s expectation and let them defines my identity based on how I exercised God’s given gift which mislead me into many assumption path.   People keep telling me:

Look at Michael, he got gift to be into pastoral ministry!

Michael, you got gift of being evangelist!

Wow, I wish Michael is our pastor of our church!

List going on!

Before I can goes further about finding true self in yourself.   I would like to share one scenario from page of Infinity Crusade # 6 which was written by Jim Starlin and drew by Ron Lim.  It is one of milestone and classic storyline in history of Marvel Comics.   One of most deadly villain known as Thanos which was known as The Mad Titan (You can easily spot his appearance in post-credit of film Avengers & Avengers: Age of Ultron and Guardian of the Galaxy).

Thanos was willing to offer assistance to one of his enemies, Adam Warlock, and they accomplished mission in destroying cosmic egg to prevent big blow to earth.  I wanted you to look at their conversation:

Obviously, you can see how Adam was telling something to Thanos in about being hero.  Thanos retorted back in attempt to defense his own identity as who he is.  He is not interested in letting Adam make perspective about Thanos.  Thanos wanted to be Thanos that all at same time he have his own missions to seek else than just superheroes’ vision!  So bottom line of all, be yourself!  Are you curious at full page of their conversation so here it is:

 

I had to deconstruct (unlearn) my programmed way of thinking on how those people tell me!  It is where my true life in presence of God began on November 29, 2012!   This date will forever be remembered as turning point in my life.  I re-discover my walk with God with all new meaningful perspective.

Since childhood, I was movie buff and comic guru/geek and always had great love about it because I sense there are much analogy in them.   I let someone take away my identity and my passion and re shape me with something which I did not find anything enjoyable.

In my walk with God, I returned to my old root of my passion of being movie buff and comic guru/geek and I learned to use those as analogy and how it reflects our walk with God and importance of finding true meaning of life in presence of God.

It is where I finally learn to enjoy my freedom in presence of God, it is true beginning of discovering true identity in Christ.  If people do not like what I am doing as movie buff and comic guru/geek then so therefore it is not my problem, it is their problem!

To be yourself, you need to be truly free from those toxic people where they will not let you be yourself.  In order to be truly be yourself is already verified beautifully by Jesus as he engaged in conversation with one expert on religious law:

Jesus said, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”

The man answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.”Also, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Jesus said to him, “Your answer is right. Do this and you will live.” ~Luke 10:27-28 (NCV)

Loving God as first thing to do will bring the true love of self-acceptance because getting in an intimacy relationship will bring you to the point where God wanted you to be YOU!