All the animals have been made “according to their kinds,” but this particular creation, man, is to be made after God’s kind. Evidently God was out to make a creature as much like him as a creature can be. He was out to have a son who looked like him, in fact a people who share his likeness (which, by the way, is still his intention, which will not be thwarted.)
Summing Yourself Up
These days, if we want to tell someone who we are, we have to be adept at defining it in 160 characters or less. That’s all you get to say about who you are in your Twitter bio. For your Instagram bio you get only 150 characters. So how does a person express what is at the heart of who she is in 150 or even 160 characters?
Some people—even dead people and made-up people—find interesting ways to do this. Albert Einstein has a Twitter feed, or more accurately, someone made up a Twitter handle and a bio for him. His Twitter handle is, unsurprisingly, @emc2, and he introduces himself this way:
Former genius, now cartoonish icon representing the word ‘smart’ in plumbing and used car advertisements.
Similarly, there is a Twitter account under the name Darth Vader. He uses the handle @darkside. He introduces himself to the Twittersphere this way:
Community Manager for Sith Lord but tweets are my own. Asthmatic. Dad to two rambunctious Jedis.
His website? WhoIsYourDaddy.com.
My favorite might be the Twitter account under the name of “Cowardly Lion,” who says about himself, “Formerly King of the Forest, now Personal Life Coach and Author of The Courage Trap. Helping you discover your inner Lion.™ Likes: Poppies, Good Witches, Toto. Dislikes: Flying Monkeys, Brooms.”
So how about you? When you introduce yourself in person or online, what do you say about who you are and what you do? What does your introduction say about how you see yourself, about where you find the source of your identity?
We all struggle with our sense of identity, don’t we? (Or is it just me?) I have a friend in her fifties who’s in a bit of an identity crisis, trying to figure out who she wants to be and what she wants to do when she grows up. She is one of the most amazing people I know—a godly, radiant, beautiful, fun person. She’s also accomplished a lot in the way that she has given herself away to her kids and her kids’ friends, in the way that she has given herself away to people around her in times of need, and the way she has given herself—her credibility, her passion, and plenty of her money—to a particular cause, all out of love for Christ. But how do you put those kinds of things on a resume or on a bio that follows your name on a website? These are the sorts of things that can easily leave us feeling like nobodies. And, oh, how we long to be somebodies.