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My Birthday

A couple of weeks ago I celebrated my birthday. Here's how...

I woke up sore. Very sore. As I went to get up, every muscle in my body screamed at me in laughter as if to say, 'What, are you kidding me? You're getting up? Now? At all?'

Are those my hips creaking? My feet are yelling at me. My body feels....really...old! Is this the beginning of the end? Will I ever want to get up again? If this is what the down hill feels like, then I don't like it. How is this happy?

That is how I felt on my birthday.

Then I remembered that I had been walking around Disney World for two days straight while carrying a 40-pound weight, also known as my 4-year old daughter.

Sometimes our immediate pain causes us to forget our true identity. I'm 36. I'm still young. I'm in reasonably good shape. But my suffering (if the effects of a great Disney trip can be called suffering) caused me to forget my true identity.

The truth is that we are not what we experience. We can allow those experiences to shape our identity. But we don't have to. Life, and the suffering that sometimes comes with it, is just life. Our identity has been created and hidden with God.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory (Colossians 3:3-4).
There are many other scriptures that will point towards the same truth, but this is one of my favorites. Paul has been discussing our actions as Christians, but always within the context of Christ living in us. In this verse, he nails it clearly when he identifies Christ as our life. Guess what? This life, our life even, is not about us.

But there's another good reason why we should not identify ourselves by suffering we experience. It's in another letter of Paul's.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all (2 Corinthians 4:16-17).
Yeah, all that walking made me feel like I was wasting away. But if life isn't about me, it's even less about this body God has given me.

Since the vacation ended, my body has recovered, although a lack of exercise for 2 weeks has proven not to have been a great choice. But even this will not identify me. My life is hidden with Christ. The End.
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