Who Am I?

Psalm 8:4–9 NET

Of what importance is the human race, that you should notice them? Of what importance is mankind, that you should pay attention to them, and make them a little less than the heavenly beings? You grant mankind honor and majesty; you appoint them to rule over your creation; you have placed everything under their authority, including all the sheep and cattle, as well as the wild animals, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea and everything that moves through the currents of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, how magnificent is your reputation throughout the earth!

Do you ever find yourself asking “Who am I?” Or maybe not who. Maybe what? Or maybe even why? “Why am I here?” “Why do I exist?” “Why. ?” The universe is vast and almost eternal. I am so small, so short lived, so insignificant. And I have an evolved yet limited mind. It’s evolved enough to ask questions about existence, but too limited to ever come up with the answers on its own.

Whole schools of philosophy have risen in response to this very question. Existentialism tells us that what is important is that you and I each have freedom as individuals, to act in whichever man we choose. Hedonism tells us that the point of life is to enjoy it as much as possible. Utilitarianism says we’re here to be of maximum benefit to the rest of sentient life. Absurdism says all efforts to answer this question will ultimately fail, but we should keep trying anyway.

But all of those answers leave something to be desired. We can follow them to a certain point, but ultimately they fail to satisfy. When we seek pleasure, at some point we ask whether we’re benefiting others. When we seek only to benefit others, we eventually find ourselves asking what’s in it for us. Freedom is nice, but what’s the point of freedom if we don’t know who we’re free to be?

You Are Loved

You Belong

You Are the Special Creation of God

When the psalmist sits back to answer the question “Who am I?” it leads him to a deeper truth. He does not ever reach a solid conclusion about who humans are, but what he does conclude is that humans are loved and favored by God, and because of who God is, that ought to be enough.

In Les Misrables, Jean ValJean finds himself asking this question in the midst of a personal crisis. Having escaped from prison and built a successful life for himself, Jean sees a man who looks a lot like him about to be taken into prison, and as it turns out, the man is going to prison because the authorities think he is Jean. This causes him to question himself. To ask who he is. What kind of person he is willing to be. And like the Psalmist, he finds that it is less important to know who he is, than to know whose he is.

Song