The Unfolding Story of Who We Are Becoming
I was born in South Korea, emigrated to the U.S. at age ten, became a naturalized citizen during college—and after thirty-seven years living in this country, I still don’t know where I belong. I visited my motherland with my wife almost twenty years ago for the first time since flying out of there in 1989, and many native Koreans knew right away that I was from America. I thought my Korean didn’t carry an American accent, so I was surprised that they could tell so quickly. They explained, “We can tell by your outdated fashion and hairstyle.” Ouch—those were new outfits! So I’m not Korean enough over there, and I’m not American enough over here. Then I look in the mirror and I see that spiritually I’m not holy enough, financially not well off enough, physically not fit enough, intellectually not smart enough. The list goes on and on. It’s a tiresome narrative that whispers in my ears too often.
Of course, you don’t have to have an immigration story to know what it’s like to feel “not good enough.” As a pastor and a counselor, I don’t know anyone who seeks professional counseling because they struggle with feeling too good about themselves! I frequently talk to people who feel that they are not good enough. As if I don’t know what that’s like, I ask with a curious frown, “Why do you think this way about yourself?” What I’ve noticed is that there’s always a story to go with it. It’s not just a mood disorder. It’s not just seasonal. Something happened. Someone said something, and it hurt. Whatever happened, whoever said what they said or did what they did, it was powerful. The damage was residual and deep. And no, time (alone) does not heal. It’s like a bully that never goes away.
What if we learned to become more comfortable with the mystery of not knowing fully who we are yet?
The antidote to the nagging voice that says, “I’m not good enough,” is hard to find, because we might be looking at the wrong places. We might assume too readily that the goal of talking to a discouraged person is to make them feel better about themselves. It’s humbling and frustrating as a helper to know that telling a person “You are good enough” or “You are loved” doesn’t really help. They might, for a brief moment, thank you for your kind words, but they will still walk away with a strong grip on their own beliefs.
What if instead we learned to become more comfortable with the mystery of not knowing fully who we are yet? What if our goal was less focused on feeling better and more focused on trusting more? What if we sought to increase our trust in God’s intentional design for our individual uniqueness and began to ponder what plans he might have for us in the future? This approach could provide a gentle disruption to spiraling discouragement.
When we are caught in the “I’m not good enough” storm, perhaps a better goal might be to get grounded. It’s about developing an audacious stance to let feelings do what they do but not allow them to destroy our
entire existential framework. It’s about being able to hear, I’m not good enough, in our head, then letting the heart offer a rebuttal that says, Yes, but there’s more. There’s more to me. There’s more to my story; it’s still being written. There’s more to discover why I was made. Reframing these inner narratives won’t necessarily cause someone to quickly transition from being sad to happy, but it may help them to breathe a little better, to inhale a bit of hope and exhale a bit of anxiety.
To use my story as an example, the mystery of not knowing myself fully helps me to let myself feel sad about feeling like a “marginal” person at times, while finding pleasure in the ongoing discovery of the person God is developing me into—made for purposes beyond my time on earth as an immigrant. I can hear my heart say, “There’s more to me than how I am perceived or categorized.” I can learn to appreciate the person I am today while also anticipating who I am becoming and who I will become, especially in heaven. That sounds so exciting even as I write this!
Much of our knowing about ourselves is based on our lived experiences here on earth. And most of our certainties about our identity are based on who we think we are. Yet who we think we are is different from who we actually are. I can think that I’m Italian. But the truth will say that I’m Korean. I can think that I’m funny. But no one is laughing. (The harsh truth will say that I was not funny!) We can think that we’re not good enough. Yet the God of all truth says, “Who told you that? You are my beloved and that makes you perfect.” We may not be able to see that for ourselves just yet. That’s the challenge. But someday we will be able to see.
Here are three categories to help us organize how we typically think about ourselves. This framework has helped me to identify quickly which areas can inflate or deflate a person’s view of themselves.
Who I think I am based on what I have or don’t have.
This category includes the things we possess—money, work title, family legacy, physical attributes, talents, number of friends, and so on. Someone may think very highly of themselves because they make a lot of money, come from a good family, are a leader in the community, have a ton of followers on their social media accounts, or maybe just because they’re tall. Likewise, someone can think lowly of themselves because they haven’t broken the six-figure salary threshold, come from a broken family, or don’t have extra letters to put after their name. That’s why a neurosurgeon may walk a little taller next to a nurse because he thinks he’s higher on the ladder. A teacher may feel smaller standing next to the principal because she thinks she’s lower. In the organizational chart, yes, there is hierarchy, and the pay grades vary. But in terms of intrinsic human value, we are the same—even though we think differently and treat ourselves accordingly.
Who I think I am based on what I did or didn’t do.
This category has to do with our memories and accomplishments. Those who did admirable things and accomplished much may think highly about themselves. Those who are haunted by past mistakes or the regrets of “should have, could have, would haves” are rocked by the perpetual sense of being a failure. Those who didn’t do “bad things” during their youth may think of themselves as the “ideal Christian.” Those who did those things may experience shame, even years later, even though Jesus has fully forgiven them and redeemed them as a new creation. Even spirituality can take on a ranking system.
Who I think I am based on what was done to me.
This category breaks my heart the most. It pertains to those who have experienced trauma, abuse, abandonment, or betrayal. One recurring theme I hear from both men and women in this category is the “open box item” mentality—the belief that they are tainted, compromised, or permanently ruined because of what was done to them, like a product that is marked down at Best Buy or Home Depot because the packaging was already opened—even though the items are brand-new. Such people think of themselves as lowly because their dignity, value, beauty, and right to be respected were taken from them. Similarly, people with this mentality feel devalued not because of who they are, but because of the circumstances they’ve endured.
So we start to think we are not good enough for many reasons. Yet we must remember that who we think we are is not who we really are. Who we think we are is typically based on our lived experiences, so it feels more certain and convincing. We can point to a cause. But who we are (actually) is hard to grasp, because we’re still in the process of discovering who that is, and it includes an intangible spiritual component as well. Furthermore, that part of our being sits much deeper within us. Who we are at the “soul” level is richly complex and beautiful beyond our own imagination. It is this deep level of our being that will rise up to the heavens, is it not? The physical bodies we rely on to define our value have demonstrated their frailty. The person we think we are, based on what we have or did or was done to us in this body, is temporary. We forget that there’s more to us than what the mirror reflects to us each morning.
The gospel helps us to see that we are created beings. Knowing our Maker opens our eyes to see that we are more than finite creatures. We were made with eternity in mind, and we have yet to fully realize God’s design in making each one of us unique, for customized purposes that will take us beyond our jobs, roles, and ministries
on earth.
In John 16:12-13 Jesus says, “I have so much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (NIV). There’s something exciting about knowing more about who we truly are and the new life that God will give us through Jesus Christ.
What if we loosened our grip on our current justifications for thinking too highly or too lowly about ourselves? What if we could be humored by how fickle we really are? Something great happens, and we say God is good and we are awesome. Something bad happens, and we say, God is not good and we are not awesome. Yet in those circumstances, I think we are really trying to say, “I feel joyful and grateful that God gave me this, I got to do this, and this happened to me today.” Or, “I feel sad, angry, hurt, disappointed, anxious that I don’t have this, I didn’t get to do that, or this was done to me.”
I feel. Not “I am,” but, “I feel.” As for knowing who we are, I would say it this way: “I am who I am as God made me, and I’m still discovering what all that entails.” Or another way, “I only know what I know for now, but there’s more to discover.”
Friends, if our God is the great I AM, we are the little I am. That is a simple but profound statement. There’s more to each of us than we know. We may be insecure because we haven’t seen the full picture yet. We may get impatient because we think we already know who we are or what we want to be, and we can’t understand why this good God won’t make our plans come true already. We may get a little delusional occasionally, because we work so hard to become an important person in our small circles and therefore think that we deserve all the fruits of our labor.
There’s more to us than what our life story says about us. Moving forward, let us panic less that we are not measuring up to what “success” is supposed to look like. When we unintentionally get caught up in that storm of comparing and feeling down on ourselves again, let us return to the basic building blocks that have been revealed to us already: you are a created being, made in the image of God, redeemed by the blood of Christ, waiting to go home, where you will discover that there’s more to you than what you are thinking right now, beautifully made for him, for his glory’s sake, with eternity in mind.
My Covenant friends, live well. Live beautifully. Because there’s more.
This article was first published in the Covenant Companion Summer 2025 issue, the official magazine of the Evangelical Covenant Church.
