For Wilshire Baptist Church
On a recent walk on one of Garland’s creek-side trails, a woman approached us quickly with a cell phone near her ear and a worried look on her face. She lowered her phone — she said she was on hold with the police — and she asked if we’d seen a driver’s license on the trail. She said it had come out of her pocket and she was retracing her steps to find it. We hadn’t seen it but we told her we’d watch for it as we continued walking. For the rest of our walk I was staring at the bland pavement and the grass beside the trail rather than enjoying the trees and blue sky above.
We call it “losing our identity,” but obviously we don’t worry about these things because we’re afraid we’ll no longer be identifiable to the world. Instead, we worry that someone else will take our information and pretend they are us.
That was my fear one rainy night in January 2002 when I jumped out of a cab in New York City, got to my hotel room and discovered my wallet was missing. Apparently, I dropped it in the back seat as I was paying the driver. Some quick calls to the credit agencies froze all my accounts, and a trip to the Times Square police precinct got me the affidavit I needed to fly home without any identification except for a birth certificate faxed by my mother. Meanwhile, for reasons I will never fathom, there never has been the slightest blip of identity theft from a wallet that held several major credit cards, my driver’s license and my social security card. All I can figure — and hope — is that my wallet got pushed under the seat, was never found, and maybe traveled with the cab to the car crusher when its service life was over.
I often wonder what it was like when the only form of identity people had to worry about was their actual physical identity. I suppose someone could dress up and impersonate you if there was something to be gained from doing that. Classic literature and even the Bible are full of those scenarios. And, of course, digital impersonations happen all the time now.
Another way to mess with your ID today is if you do it to yourself. I’m talking about acting in ways counter to your character; being someone you’re not. Then people might ask questions, but not “who are you?” Instead, they’d ask, “What’s gotten into you?” and they might ask each other behind your back, “Has the devil gotten hold of him?”
Social media has lured or tricked many people into believing they can be someone else when they are online. Too often we’ve seen instances where people said something off the cuff that revealed something unexpected about them. Sometimes they’ll boldly say, “Yep, that’s me; that’s what I think about that.” But often they’ll try to walk it back and apologize or say, “That’s not really who I am; I wasn’t thinking.”
Protecting our identity can feel like a full-time job sometimes. Thankfully there are plenty of technical processes available to protect us from digital thieves. Even then, we have to be on guard and on our toes all the time. A careless click on an unclear or curious link can send us down a rabbit hole of account cancellations and reordering of our lives.
But protecting ourselves from acting on our lowest or weakest impulses? That’s much more difficult. The best thing to do is to try and live authentically, and the best way to do that is to listen. I believe God has put inside each of us a little spiritual voice that whispers to us when we are not being authentic — when we are not being who God created us to be. I’ve heard that voice more often than I care to admit.
Thankfully, it’s not a voice of judgement so much as a voice of disappointment that says, “Come on, you’re better than this. I made you better than this.” It’s also a voice of invitation: “Be who I made you to be. Be your true self. Be you.”
Ironically, as I’m writing this, I’m getting messages that someone hacked my Facebook account and is sending friend requests to people who already are my friends. I’ve changed my password, but I also have a friend who has engaged the hacker and is sharing the gospel with him. Apparently, telling him that “God loves the scammer but hates the scam” was too much and the hacker has blocked her. Feel free to do the same. Sometimes God calls us to be that whisper to others.