HT: "tell me who you are"

"Tell me who you are." The first question I faced in an job interview recently, the question that looms over a first date, the obsession of our society: getting to know other people, and trying to know ourselves.  My friend Tim introduced me earlier this week to the idea that "psychology, as a field, has been centered on helping us in this search to answer, 'Who am I?' ... and 'What's wrong with me?'"  (David Jones, The Psychology of Jesus, p. 4)

I love this answer: 

HT: Ray Ortlund

A friend of Eric Clapton’s asked him a good question:

“Chris’s first question to me, at our very first session, was, ‘Tell me who you are,’ a very simple question you would think, but I felt the blood rush up to my face and wanted to yell at her, ‘How dare you!  Don’t you know who I am?’  Of course, I had no idea who I was, and I was ashamed to admit it.”
Eric Clapton, Clapton: The Autobiography (New York, 2007), page 257.

Who am I?  I am a man in Christ.  I am who I most truly am not by force of anything intrinsic to myself but by force of God’s mercy to me.  God has breathed into me the breath of life, and I have thus become a living being, in both creation and redemption.  I have no other reality.  I need no other.  I desire no other.

However I proudly depart from this reality, I am diminished.  As I humbly rejoice in this reality, I am vibrant with life.