be: 40 words in 40 days

“Be still and know that I am God.”- Psalm 46:10

“Be.” What does that mean? The focus is not on doing. It is on who I am inside. Who am I? The scary thing about being is that you have to face the question, “who am I?” In “doing”, we are satisfied with being defined by what we do. Sometimes we use the things we do to avoid the question of who we are. “Who am I” looks beyond the tasks, the image, the roles and gets at the very soul. 

When we cease to be defined by what we do, we have to face the darkness of our own souls – the insecurities, the sin, the addictions, the compulsions. 

Our identity in Christ is the key to our conundrum. In Beloved, Henri Nouwen writes

 “Being the Beloved is the origin and the fulfillment of the life of the Spirit. Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our Belovedness become enfleshed in everything we think, say or do. As long as ‘being the Beloved’ is little more than a beautiful thought or a lofty idea that hangs above my life to keep me from becoming depressed, nothing really changes. What is required is to become the Beloved in the commonplaces of my daily existence and, bit by bit, to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless specific realities of everyday life. Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am.”

I want to wrap up who I am - my “be”- in belovedness.