Letting Go of Who We Might Have Been

When you were a kid, you were offered a box. It was well-packaged, well-intended, and oozing with unintended consequences. The box was the promise of an ideal you, something you were made for. The box’s contents were dependent on your gender, your socioeconomic status, the worldview of your parents, but if you were born in America, it came to you nonetheless. If you were born into an evangelical family, it was all the more remarkable because God drew the contents of the box.

The box contained a secret blueprint, a map of a predetermined self, a bespoke contribution you are to make in the world. There’s only one catch. You never get to open it. Through a thousand messages, both implied and explicit, they (the authority figures in your life) set you out on a quest: stumble your way through the wandering trail of life collecting clues, fragments, and warnings of the blueprint’s unchanging code.

From your earliest days you are inundating cues to prompt you to piece together the blueprint:

• Oh, he’s got long legs, maybe he’ll be a basketball player.
• Look at that math test; I bet you were made to be an engineer or an architect.
• With a work ethic like that, you’ll never make it to who you're meant to be.
• You’re friend Eric is going to distract you from God’s will for your life.
• The greatest purpose of your life is to be a mother.
• Spiritual gifts are God’s blueprint for how we contribute.
• I just want you to be who you are.

Voice by voice, choice by choice, you become a true believer in the only universal American religion: the search for the ideal self, ephemeral as it may be.

What’s Really in the Box

Time marches on. You’ve been carrying around that box for decades. Its seams cracked, and the shining wrapping paper—once promised a gift—is long gone. With time has come compromises. You’ve made a couple of billion mistakes. Your path led you down roads you couldn’t have imagined. You got fat and never played basketball. If there was a blueprint for your life, a person you were supposed to be, it must undoubtedly be ancient history. What’s the harm in looking at it now?

You crack open the lid, and out of the tiny box seeps a poisonous weed. It twists around your arms, your waist; you feel it reaching for your throat. Your mind races through the hundreds of prompts from well-meaning adults in your life. You see them now as brief cracks in the box’s seal. You also see them for what they are. Your mom, your boss, your teacher, they carry their own poison boxes. Void of blueprints for the perfect identity, flowing instead with toxic shame.

I spent decades imagining this idealized self. What he was meant to do, what God has put him here to contribute. I reveled in the weight of my future glory, the significance of life I would have to earn my way into and eventually prove worthy of. I imagined my calling as a custom designer suit, one that slumped over my shoulders, currently ill-fitting, but with a little effort on my part, eventually the perfect size.

It is so easy to translate our feelings of worthlessness as prompts toward a better self. The truth is that the sensation of being inside a suit that didn’t fit wasn’t calling, it was self-hatred. One that I had been conditioned for by a hundred others strangled by their inadequacies. As life surges forward and we somewhere cross the line where believing we can reach our idealized self is possible, we begin to export that desire onto others. Often our children. We turn to Greta Thunberg to carry the weight of our unrealized dreams.

Stop Paying it Forward

We can stop paying forward this fever dream. We can stop passing the viral box from one generation to the next. And we can do so with the most powerful tool in the Christian kit: forgiveness.

Forgiveness releases the giver from controlling the receiver's future. When we forgive, we stand back from the control panel of the universe, allowing outcomes to play out as they will, shrinking our jurisdiction. Forgiveness is always a terrifying endeavor on the front end and an endless relief on the back.

• We can forgive our past selves for the hunt. For all the ways we succumbed to the lie of the idealized self, for all the ways we punished a younger us for just trying to make it through. Forgiving the past acknowledges God’s forgiveness. It treats us the way Jesus would.
• We can forgive our past selves for never achieving the dream. Hindsight causes us to see the past inaccurately. We measure the choices we made by the lessons we learned after. Forgiving yourself in the past does not validate the idealized self; it liberates us from measuring our histories against a fantasy.
• We can forgive our present selves for paying it forward. Though cynicism and guilt may have made you feel immune to the box’s promises, consider the ways you are holding others to their “ideal self.” Forgiveness means letting people be less than we wish they were. But it also means letting go of the blueprint that defines that wish.
• We can forgive the people who gave us and validated the box. We can ask for the eyes of Jesus to see them for what they are: people failing their imagined blueprints, carrying the weight of their shame forward and needing somewhere for it to go.

Forgiveness divorces God’s vision for our lives from the promises of idealism. God, who wound together DNA strands and cell fibers in our mothers’ wombs, did not make us like a prescription. We are made like permanently soft clay, ever-moved by the world around us, ever-reshaped by hands of steadfast love and care. God is not waiting for you to become the thing He planned for you. That was Plato’s big idea, not Jesus’. God is not waiting at all.

God is only ever here. Not in our judgments of who we were or our images of who we should be. Here.

Asking for the devil’s blueprint back.

Offering His gentle hand instead.

The adventure of life is not in finding yourself, but in showing up for each wild and woolly moment, completely liberated by His love which sets us free. Let's go.

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Dismantling the weight we carry and awakening to God’s life in every moment doesn’t happen all at once. Let’s do this journey together: