Don't Let Anyone Tell You Who You Aren't

I’m not very good with the DVR. Sometime last week, in the middle of my fight with flu, I accidently told the DVR to record the whole series of The Mentalist instead of just the one episode I was trying to watch. I watch The Mentalist because of my dad. He was watching it one night and I got hooked. This tends to happen to me when watching TV.

At the beginning of this week, during my dad’s fight with a sinus infection, my mom told us that we needed to clean off some of our episodes of The Mentalist because they were was filling up recording space. Being the good daughter that I am, I have since spent every possible moment watching The Mentalist in an effort to clean off the DVR, even if it’s meant sitting beside a coughing, hacking dad.

Last night, as I was fitting in one final episode of The Mentalist before going to bed, a minor character said some really mean things to Jane, the mentalist. I like Jane. He’s highly intelligent and quirky and he always drinks hot tea. So when that man said something mean to him, it made me mad. In my anger toward a minor character on a fictional TV show, I posted the statement:

“Don’t let anyone tell you who you aren’t.”

I was talking to Jane, on a recording of a TV show from 2009, but I knew the non-fictional, real-life truth in the statement as I was writing it. I also know the truth of its opposite when the teller is speaking from fear or ignorance: “Don’t let anyone tell you who you are.”

When I woke up this morning, I found a short conversation between two very unlikely people on my wall. They had both responded to my statement to Jane, and then Dr. Colby, my college English professor, told Christina, one of my dearest friends from divinity school, that she looked fully alive in her profile picture. Christina simply said thanks.

What Dr. Colby doesn’t know is that Christina is fully alive—that her current profile picture, while demonstrating happiness and life, isn’t the happiest I’ve ever seen her. Christina is full of deep joy and a giving, hospitable spirit that has reminded me many times to breathe and to remember that I am exactly who God created me to be.

What Christina doesn’t know is that Dr. Colby made a huge impact on my life in college. While it’s true that I made my only B in Dr. Colby’s English class and that I couldn’t, for the life of me, write a thesis statement to her liking :-), it’s also true that the many hours we spent together because of my writing difficulties built a mutual respect that has stood the course of time. I suppose that in an ideal world I would have sailed through that English class, made an A, and graduated with a 4.0. But, in the real world, struggling through Dr. Colby’s class, having a crisis of belief in myself and my ability to write (a crisis lasted for well over a year), having a mentor to walk the course with me and teach me, and emerging from the crisis with my own voice, means way more than a perfect GPA. It's not like anyone walks around asking about my college GPA anyway! Through the ears of my perfectionist, people pleasing, self critical, self damning college self, I heard Dr. Colby telling me that I couldn’t write—that I was not a writer. But she wasn’t telling me that. She was trying help me be the best writer and self that I could be.

I am blessed to have parents with whom to watch TV and share these days of life. I am blessed with their DVR and sofa and electricity that allow me to see the world through different characters’ eyes. I am blessed to have friends like Christina and Dr. Colby—friends who believe in and support me not for who I’m not or should be but for who I am. And if you are reading this then I am blessed to have you, too. I am blessed that you care to read words from a girl with a blemished writing past and that you have given your time to my thoughts.

Don’t let anyone tell you who you’re not, friends. And don’t let anyone tell you who you are unless they are affirming what you know to be true in your spirit…that you are a loved and cherished person of worth and value, created in God’s image, redeemed by God’s grace, gifted by God’s spirit, freed by Christ’s forgiveness, and held in God’s love even when you do not know it is there. God’s love is there, my friends. It is there. Actually, it is here. It's what Christmas is all about. And it can never, ever be erased.