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Welcome to another episode of Jubilee Life Coaches Blog. I am Coach Brian. I have been a pastor for over 30 years, and lately I have been working as a Christian life coach. I bring a balance of Christian counseling and reformed theology to our worldview. Today's episode asks an old question that has become very hard to answer. Who am I? Recently, I listened to a lecture by the historian Carl Truman. He named one question that sits underneath much of the confusion of our time. What does it mean to be human? What is humanity for? Put more personally, it sounds like this. Who am I? And what am I for? Truman made a simple observation. Imagine you were born in a small village in the year 1200. That question would not have troubled you much. You would be baptized, married, and buried in the same place. You would probably never travel more than 40 miles from home. Everything that made you who you are was already settled for you. We live in the reverse. As Truman put it, almost everything you might tell someone about yourself is the result of a choice you have made. Where you live, what you do, what you believe. Ours is a world of choice. It is freedom. So why are we so tired? Truman traces how this happened. Over several centuries, the old authority of place and time began to loosen. And if the outer world no longer tells you who you are, where do you go to find out? The answer was inward. Truman calls the result the psychologized self. I am no longer shaped mainly by the relationships around me. I become the feelings I experience. And being authentic comes to mean expressing those feelings outwardly. Freedom sounds like a gift, but it comes with a quiet bill. If everything that makes me who I am is my own choice, then the whole of my being rests on my own shoulders. Identity is no longer something I discover, it is something I have to build again every single day. And if feelings are the foundation, that foundation shifts more often than the seasons. In my coaching work, I meet this weariness often. People say, I don't know who I really am. That is not laziness. It is the honest fatigue of someone asked to build an identity on top of feelings. In the language of internal family systems, we might say there are parts of us working very hard to manage us, to prove us, to win approval for us. Those parts are not enemies, but they were never meant to carry the whole weight of who we are. Here, reformed theology and internal family systems agree on something important. My true center is not something I manufactured. Truman closed by saying that as a historian, he explains the past. He gave the diagnosis and left the door open. The gospel walks through that door. Truman asked, What is humanity for? The Westminster Shorter Catechism answers in its very first question: Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. My meaning is not something I dig out of myself. I receive it in relationship with the one who made me. The modern self says, I am my own. Scripture says the opposite. In 1 Corinthians chapter 6, Paul writes, You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. At first that may sound like a cage, but listen again, it is a resting place. I do not have to construct myself. I have already been made. I have already been known. I have already been bought. I am made in the image of God. I am known from my mother's womb, and in Christ, I am an adopted child. Tim Keller called this the freedom of gospel self-forgetfulness. I am released from the endless work of proving and managing myself. I get to rest in one far larger than me. When the world shakes and our feelings surge, Colossians says quietly, Your life is hidden with Christ in God. My identity is safe, not in my hands, in his. So let me ask you, gently, are you tired from holding yourself together? The gospel does not hand you a heavier load, it lets you set one down. Your feelings are honored guests, but they are not your master. And to that part of you still trying to reinvent yourself every morning, perhaps you could say today, thank you. You have worked hard, but the work of making me who I am is already in another's hands. Here are two questions to sit with this week. When someone asks, Who are you? What answer rises up first? Does it come from what you have achieved or from what you have been given? The Catechism says, Our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. This week, in one small way, what would it look like to actually enjoy that purpose rather than only perform it? We are freed in Christ to live. Now let us live to free others. This is Jubilee Coach. Until next time, Godspeed.