Stolen Identity

In the past several months I have been raided. It first started with my wallet which just happened to contain almost every important card to access financial resources, healthcare, gas and food discounts, roadside support, and legal verification. The snatcher did not cease there. A day later he came back for my car charger. Some weeks later one of the new credit cards I had to reorder in which he purchased over hundreds in clothing, shoes, and gas in a matter of hours. And then finally, my dead sea salt body scrub I was especially looking forward to. I was done. Done with the kidnapper.

There are seasons in our lives where we feel like everything is being snatched and stolen every time we turn around. Often the most valuable of those things is our identity.

When the enemy first comes on the scene in the Garden of Eden that’s precisely what he sought to do with Eve. Eve already had an identity. She was the creation of God, His child, and Adam’s counterpart given to help him rule and have dominion over all that was on the earth. She had both identity and purpose at the moment of her creation.

The enemy came along to get her to question the foundation and essence of her very being. He wanted her to abandon it for something greater – to be God Himself. We all still struggle with this same desire today. Not to be who God has created us to be and to live for the purpose for which we have been created. No, we want to be God and often are the gods of our lives, albeit deficient ones.

So the enemy deceived Eve as she forsook the security of being who and where God had intended her to be. Many of us know this as The Fall (Genesis 3). And fall they did. The work that was once to be enjoyable was now laborious. Childbearing that was intended to be painless would be full of agony. Marriage that was to be a beautiful duet led by the man would become a dance-off. What peace that once existed between the Father and sons was now discordant. And the home where all their needs would seamlessly be provided for was stripped away because of a deceived identity.

As I reread these sections of Scripture, something stood out to me that I hadn’t noticed before. Before The Fall, Eve had only been mentioned as “the woman.” But right after God handed out His judgment for their sin, Adam sought to restore what had been undone by His wife’s loss of identity. He gave it back to her. He named her at that moment – Eve. The meaning and purpose behind her name are that she would be the “mother of all the living.”

Before The Fall, there had only been life. But now they had known and would more intimately know death. Death had rushed in to snatch everything that had originally been given freely. So while they faced the mess, destruction, and loss of the life they had known, Adam made a triumphant statement that this was not the end of their story. That the warped identity Eve had been deceived to take on in place of the one she had been given, could be undone by restoring her identity in their new reality. Adam was encouraging his wife that though death had gripped them, she would still be the mother of all that is alive.

A lot of things are dead and decayed in our lives too. Things we prized and loved and things that ran off with all of our stuff and identity. Though it’s filled with some explicit language, these are probably my favorite poetic lines from For Colored Girls:

“Somebody almost ran off with all of my stuff and I was standing there looking at myself the whole time. […] Almost ran off with all my stuff and the one running with it don’t know he got it. I’m shouting, ‘This is mine!’ and he don’t even know he got it. My stuff is the anonymous ripped-off treasure of the year. Did you know somebody almost got away with me? Me, in a plastic bag under his arm. Me, Juanita Sims. Somebody almost walked off with all my stuff.”1

I felt that. All of that.

Except the people and tragedies are pawns and the one who got my stuff, the one who almost got away with me, knows it. But I had some news for him. It turned out my dead sea salt body scrub wasn’t stolen. It had been delivered to the wrong address, and now I know purposely that it might be kept secure from those sticky hands. My license that had been snatched with my wallet didn’t matter to me any longer either. I wasn’t that person anymore. I went and got a new identification card. I got my name back. I got me back. My identity had been found.

Recall the occurrences in your life when you began to be robbed of you. What role did you play in giving your identity away or forsaking it? What do you need to do to recover your identity? There are steps both spiritually and practically you can take. Pray and ask God to show you who you are in Him. Write down what practices, people, and atmospheres are in conflict with this identity and contributing to you not fully embracing who and what God has called you to be and do.

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