I've been thinking about “questions”, which is entirely different that answering questions. I answer a million questions everyday but how often do we stop and actually think about the question? To use a metaphor, questions are food. I can either wolf it down and binge on the banquet in front of me or I can enjoy it, cutting small pieces savoring it's subtle flavors and the delicate textures as my tongue moves it over every taste bud in my mouth, letting the sensations become vision as they dance light across the back of my closed eyes.
Ooh, writing this on an empty stomach was not a good idea.
One of the questions I've been dining on has been feeding man for centuries. You can't count the tomes that have been written in an attempt to answer it. I keep coming across this query with many of my friends, but I've met older people as well who struggle to come up with a reasonable answer.
Who am I?
Philosophy has tried to answer. Most popularly known is Descartes who reasoned, “I think therefore I am.” I don't dismiss the power of the mind, but in this answer I sense a short coming.
The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, added, “You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.” My grandparents generation, called the Greatest Generation, believed this. A man worked his land, his job, and was thankful for the toil. And when the sun sets? Who am I when I cease to labor?
Heritage used to play a major role in identity. An introduction was a name followed by a long list of 'son of's. But what do we do with the broken families of today? The Fatherless? The abandoned and the lost?
Marketing is more than willing to supply you with an answer, a stylized, modernized, and capitalized answer. You are what you wear. You need this to be. Show who you are with this App.
All of this adds up to little more than questions. I walk away from each answer feeling hungry, sensing some truth, but the aftertastes of the question lingers on un-matched and un-satisfied.
I agree with Deitrich Bonhoeffer when he tasted this same question.
Incredibly well written, and a poignant thought about us. Are we so quick to give an answer that we fail to hear the questions in life. Who are we? and Who is God? and What will you do with Jesus Christ? Rushing thru life, we are quick to point to human accomplishments, but fail to realize the essence of who we are is not in us, but in Him and what He has done.
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