How Jesus Saves From Identity Crisis
I’m pleased to publish this guest post by my friend Justin Poythress.
In my early years of ministry (and maybe this past week), I daydreamed about packing up and driving to the Dallas Cowboys stadium. I would scrub toilets and work my way up to marketing, or content creation—something cool like that. Why didn’t I intern with the football team in college? Is it too late now? Should I have tried to make different friends, joined different groups?
This sort of wistful regret is what we call an identity crisis, albeit a minor one. I’m not headed to Dallas anytime soon. But people have always been having these crises. This kind of inward confusion, pain, and self-doubt is part of the unique gift of being human; it separates us from sea scallops.
But a hundred years ago, these kinds of existential crises were quite different. There was less pressure to figure out who you should be. For example, if you grew up as the daughter of a farmer, your life was more or less mapped out from birth. You would marry a farmer’s boy in town and spend your life managing that farm. Education, marriage, and the military offered a few ways to rise above your station, but everyone expected you’d do what your parents did.
Compare that with today. I have a single friend who has the means to travel at will. He’s on a dating app where he’s set the search window to…the world. But that strikes me as one of the most direct routes one can take towards misery. Given how many girls there are in the world, versus how many there are in my friend’s hometown, my friend’s lifestyle is almost certainly a one-way ticket to agonizing seasons of what-could-have-been. It’s the same dilemma I wrote about when it comes to school choice—the paralysis brought on by too many options.
Because of affluence, mobility, and the internet, you are bombarded with the message: “Don’t limit yourself! Believe bigger!” This leaves you ambivalent and wistful about any choice you do make, always looking over your shoulder. Did I miss something? Did I leave something on the table? What if I’d gone to law school like my friend Susan? What if I’d persevered with that long-distance relationship? What if I’d prioritized a different friend group? What if I’d tried the rhubarb-azalea coffee that the barista told me was life-changing? What if? What if? What if!? As Samuel James says, “our lives are lived and unlived at exactly the same rate.”
Again, none of this is new. There have always been reckless romantics plunging into marriage before their twentieth birthday. People dashed off in the Gold Rush and ended up gnawing the ground. Or someone stayed in the “safety” of their family textile business only to watch the Industrial Revolution erase it.
The increased difficulty today comes from the ease of reversibility. Westerners keep getting richer, historically speaking. Gen Z is the most affluent generation in the history of the world. That affluence, combined with the internet, is bringing an acute awareness of the growing number of choices that we have, but are not making. You can get a different degree online, purchase a new wardrobe in an hour, and swipe right to start a new romance. This expanded accessibility brings more realities within reach, but the tradeoff is more frequent identity crises.
The solution is grounding your identity in your relationship with Jesus. A Jesus-focused-relational identity is different from other aspirations. It’s not that you won’t have regrets, (they accumulate over any longterm relationship), it’s that you fail to live up to your choice, not the other way around. To the contrary, Jesus turns out better than advertised.
With Jesus, you avoid the deep, inconsolable regret of missing a fork in the road you can never go back to. The lifelong bachelorette who marries her love at 72 will mourn some “missed opportunities,” but the acuteness of that wound ebbs in the face of what she now has. In a relational-identity the present and the future are more important. Your relationship with Jesus isn’t a ship that passed you by a couple decades ago. It’s there for you today, right now.
A Jesus-focused identity pulls your heart back towards what is real, simple, and obtainable instead of nebulous ache because maybe you betrayed your best self somewhere along the way. It’s as if Jesus says, “Forget all that. Stop thinking about the past. Stop worrying about the future. I’m right here. Why don’t you enjoy this time with me right now?”
This is one of the greatest balms the Bible offers identity-tossed young adults. Picture your life as a single day on safari, driving around in your own ATV. You begin the day bursting with expectation at the infinite adventures ahead. Sure enough, you see lions and giraffes—some of the big things you came out for. You drive a little here; you pause a little there. Most of it’s enjoyable; some of it starts to feel boring and repetitive.
As you press into the heat of the afternoon, however, you begin to realize there are parts of the park you left behind, attractions you saw from a distance that you figured you’d come back to. But that time has passed. You’ve gone too far. Ahead of you are still more things—different animals or photo opps other people told you about—you won’t get to a lot of them either. There aren’t enough hours left in the day. Frustration and anxiety attack. You speed up, seeing more, but enjoying less.
As a Christian, this is the point when you need to look over at your passenger seat and see Jesus. You remember that your time in this park is one day, but this friendship lasts forever. Your enjoyment comes not from checking off a bucketlist of sightseeing, but enhancing the richness of your friendship through this shared experience. That is the magic of a Jesus-focused identity.
Justin (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is the pastor of All Saints Presbyterian in Boise, Idaho, where he and his wife, Liz, live with their two daughters. Justin is the author of Who Am I and What Am I Doing with My Life?.