Named by Adam: Lessons on Identity in Community

Before my time at Moody, someone decided that Bible college students need a way to let off steam during the last week on campus. I don’t know the story or who that someone was, but that decision led to the idea that, on the Tuesday of every finals week, faculty and staff would serve the students breakfast at 10 o’clock at night. Whatever it was supposed to look like, it has now become a tradition of all-out chaos, replete with costumes and music and public safety officers keeping watch over the whole thing. It is a complete sensory overload, at once joyous and overwhelming, and every semester I have attended, I have found myself nervous beforehand.

This time last year, I had just found out I had been offered an individual interview in the RA hiring process, which meant I had made it into the second round. I remember standing outside of the student dining room, watching everyone around me dance and chant, and thinking, “This is the reason that job would be hard for me.” The RAs at Moody lead the charge on all the excitement and I was quite certain that I could not. I am bookish and like deep conversations; the car horns outside my window make me jump. Even after I got hired, I trembled at the thought of Breakfast at Night. This, and other events of similar energy, were where I felt the most inadequate.

So, on Tuesday, I sat in my room at 7 o’clock, trying desperately to bury my anxiety in the pages of an art and theology journal. 

What if I can’t be enough for them?

Keep reading, you’ll be fine.

What if I get anxious and shut down?

You can just pretend you’re not. It’s not that big of a deal.

What if they see how lame and afraid I am? 

Would you just chill?

What if they lose respect for me? What if they don’t love me after this?

It sounds dramatic—and it is—but it really did cross my mind, a few times, and that was the root of it: I didn’t believe my floor could love me as I was.

Now don’t get me wrong: When they said they loved me, I believed them. I believed they loved me for what I did and how well I performed and how many people showed up to my events. I believed they loved me for my peaceful room and my ability to listen and my dignity and position at our school. I believed they loved me; I also believed it was a conditional love.

Such is the lie of Christian leadership, deeply ingrained in the systems we set up. We grant affirmation to the people who win the most souls, write the most books, speak with the most poignant and powerful words. Do we know and acknowledge that they are broken people? Of course—they talk about it all the time on stage. But it’s a dressed up brokenness, the kind we’re comfortable with, the kind that doesn’t lose much dignity in the telling.

Mine feels like a different kind most of the time. It feels a little bit pathetic, like maybe I shouldn’t say anything because people might think it’s stupid.

I remember coming to the startling realization that in this job, people’s expectations for me were based in things that had nothing whatsoever to do with who I actually was. I had never been so starkly aware of my identity in Christ—and so aware of the fact that our culture doesn’t care about it. And I go to Bible school. Here, in my Christian subculture, in which we talk about identity literally every week, people are measured by success, charisma, grades, cliques, interests, age, and accomplishments. And it isn’t just the RAs or the leaders being measured by this standard; it’s everybody. I size people up just like everyone else.

And none of it really matters.

Have you ever come to that realization in your relationship with Christ? Where you realize that what you do is just a bonus, that it in no way affects your intrinsic value in the kingdom of God? I’m actually at a loss for words about how to communicate it, because it has been such a hot topic for so long that our ears are stopped to it. For so long, I have felt that the conversation about identity was trite and insufficient and I got angry whenever anyone tried to remind me of it. It was like someone handing me foreign currency and telling me to pay my school bill. “It doesn’t work!” I would say. “This is worthless here!”

Which is true, as long as I buy into my earthly citizenship more than my heavenly status.

Ugh, even that sounds trite.

And listen, I’ve tried the whole I-don’t-hear-any-voice-but-Jesus thing, and that doesn’t work either. That’s like trying to be humble by self-deprecation—totally fruitless. Identity is a work of Christ and community, no two ways about it. I don’t hear Jesus and nobody else; in fact, if I start saying that, others would have reason to be concerned. I need affirmation. I need the comfort of other believers. I need people to call out my strengths and push me toward growth and tell me I’m a worthwhile person, because those things are true and they have everything to do with how God made me. Adam named Eve, not God. When God places a person in community, the community has a responsibility to affirm the identity God has already created in that person.

The problem arises when people only do that because I did a good thing. Eve wasn’t the “Mother of All Living” when Adam named her. As far as we know from Scripture, she wasn’t a mother at all yet. She had never faced the pains of childbirth, never corrected a naughty two-year-old, never fought the rebellion of a teenager, and certainly had not lived through the death of her child. She would do all of those things, and she would probably even do them well, with trust and dignity and grace. She was much closer to perfection than we are. But in the moment of her naming, all the recorded acts of Eve came to a grand total of one, and that one act was sin.

If Eve’s identity was in what she did, Adam should have named her something like “Temptress,” or “Paradise Lost.” Or maybe just plain old “Sinner.” But instead he gave her a name that maintained her dignity and beauty, even before she lived up to it—and even when she failed.

There are three reasons I think Adam could do this, even after watching Eve sin:

1. He knew she was made in the Image of God. No, Adam didn’t have a theology textbook telling him about the origin of human value, nor did he even have Scripture to draw from—but he did walk and talk with God. It’s reasonable to think that he might have stood in the garden, in the cool of the day, watching God talk to Eve, and thought, “Ahhh, that’s where she gets it.” He didn’t have to be told that Eve bore God’s Image; he could simply look and see the resemblance.
2. He knew who she was meant to be. Though the whole plan was turned on its head, the name Adam gave Eve stemmed from who she was before the Fall. Eve was always intended to be the Mother of All Living. Adam’s naming confirmed that he saw her as redeemable, still having a hand in the plans and promise of God.
3. He was a sinner, too. Adam watched Eve fall—and he fell right with her. What kind of humility would that lead to, bearing the weight of responsibility for the sin of all mankind? He tried to point fingers but God put that to a stop rather quickly. Adam understood that he was in the same boat; Eve was no more wrong than he. Because he fully understood her brokenness, he could see her in it. Her identity was broken, yes, but that didn’t change who she was. And who she was, was much different than what she did.

Even a timid and trembling RA can breathe a little easier if that’s true.

I wasn’t thinking that, though, as I sat there thumbing through the periodical pages. I was only thinking of my fear and how I couldn’t see past it. So, I called on my community.

“You guys,” I texted my small group, “I have a dumb fear.” I explained the situation and asked for their encouragement.

“WAR PAINT SON,” came Zoe’s enthusiastic reply. I laughed. No, that wasn’t quite the answer...

The other replies began to come and I began to relax a little.

“I don’t think you have to be hype,” JenJe said. “Just be you, and be present with your girls.”

Katie chimed in, “I agree with JenJe! ...Just be yourself, even if that’s not hype tonight.”

“For real just be yourself!!!” Kristen texted me later. It was easier said than done, but I took a deep breath and headed down, ready to see what would happen if I took their advice.

What happened was, I felt joy tug at my heart. I didn’t dance as we waited for the doors to open and I wasn’t shouting as we sat at the table. I didn’t steal any mascots or stand on any tables or even crack any good jokes—and maybe somebody wished I had, but if they did, I didn’t notice. The boldest thing I did all night was leave my comfort zone, twice, to weave through the crowd and give my small group friends hugs. And if you think for a moment that did not take some amount of courage, you do not understand the strength of my timidity. Each time I ran into one of them, though, I was safe, and here’s why:

Those women hold a firm conviction that I am made in the Image of God, not because they read it somewhere, but because they have seen it. They also know the unique ways He has gifted and called me, specifically, and they have received the gift of those things—not necessarily through what I do so much as through who I am, even on an apartment floor when all I’m doing is sitting in their midst, not contributing, not speaking, just being. My existence is a gift to them. “Just being myself” is truly, actually enough.

On top of this, they also know their own brokenness. They have their own fears of not being lovable. That’s why I could call them in the first place: I knew they would understand.

And in all these things, they affirm my identity. I stood in line for food with Katie and she said, “You’re not hype!” like it was a good thing. And it was. “You’re being true to yourself,” she said, with a nod of approval, and she did not mean it as some trite, cultural construct. She meant it in actuality, in a way that influences my actual life, because she cares to name me with my true identity, not all of the ways I am broken or not enough.

In the grand scheme of things, one Breakfast at Night experience doesn’t actually have much bearing on my identity. Next semester, I dearly hope I will have enough confidence just to make my quiet way to the dining room and laugh with the people I sit with, no affirmation necessary. But if not, it’s deeply okay. I can be a little pathetic. I can need encouragement. In all the ways I am broken, down to my deepest sins, I can be honest and even embarrassed, because God gave me an identity in Christ and His people know it. He did not give me a new skin to muscle myself into. My identity isn’t a costume. He didn’t give me foreign currency to try to pay my bills, and He’s not expecting me to float around with my ears plugged, only listening to the soft, warm thoughts He might have about me. He gave me a new reality, and solid, tangible people to tell me that His reality is real. Identity is not divorced from community; it is reiterated over and over again within community, so that the more I let them speak over me, the more I learn His name for me.

May we learn more and more to see one another this way, first and foremost, even as we do the work of God. 

Note: I talk about my small group a lot, but there are countless others in my community who also know how to speak my identity to me. My floor is full of mature women who affirm me again and again, not only in what I do but in who I am. I have good friends and family who also do the same, and if I were to tell every story, we’d be here for a year.