“Jesus answered, ‘The foremost is, Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength’” (Mark 12:29-30). Some of our habits might make this a very difficult task.
We all have different roles in our lives: at home, at work, at school and with the church. What typically happens, if we are not careful, is compartmentalization. Each role becomes a different identity. Instead of being the same person in each role, our character changes to play an act in each place. Usually, this is a defense mechanism. Compartmentalization is a coping mechanism in victims of trauma. They use it to wall off that part of their lives that is painful. In our case, it becomes what we do to create the least amount, or comfortable amount, of difference between us and those around us. Our need for acceptance, dislike of confrontation or fear of vulnerability drives us to compartmentalize who we are. In each role you have a carefully crafted identity that has been honed by a system of positive and negative feedback. The result is that no one truly knows who you are. They see a fragment of you in each place. We become Christians who are tolerated everywhere and accepted nowhere. When you come to worship God you worship with a fragment of your soul. While another part of your soul is dedicated to maintaining the image you have at work, at school, in the home and at any other subgroup you have in your life. We are trapped in a grid of compartmentalization. We can’t offer our whole soul to anyone, much less God.
How do we escape the grid? We need to identify what made us put up a wall in each of these areas. By asking ourselves, “What would happen if they knew the real me?” we will begin thinking about the reason we started to compartmentalize. We might have a hard time remembering who the “real me” is.
We should take inventory of who we are by determining what has been a lie or facade and what is real. When we are honest with ourselves, we can be honest with those around us.
Finally, we must remember who and Whose we are. We cannot get lost in the sea of “self-awareness” and wake up one day in Tibet trying to find ourselves. Throughout this process we must strengthen our hope and faith in God, that “anchor of the soul” (Heb. 6:19). We have been so many things to so many people that we forget that we are Christians first. We all have roles, but those roles do not define us. We are Christians that work, that go to school, that have families and that worship together. The foremost is, “Hear, O Christian!”