Who Am I?

No. 1 - 07th August 2016

My name is Mike Pritchard but that’s not who I really am. It doesn’t identify me. When I go down to the Meads surgery, they want my date of birth as well to make sure I’m not some other Mike Pritchard. But that still doesn’t identify who I am. My identity goes much deeper than that.

As a child I remember trying to work out who I really was. It can be so confusing. All through childhood, our parents tell us what to do, what to say, and even what to think. I suppose that’s why most of us go through some sort of teenage rebellion. We have to tear ourselves away from our parents in order to find out who we really are. To find our own identity.

As we get older, we start to look for that identity in other things. It may be in looking after the children or grandchildren. Many of us find it in our work and our achievements. It all helps to give us a sense of who we are and what we’re doing in this world. It makes us feel significant.

Now the problem is, all these things come to an end sooner or later. The children grow up and fly the nest. We get made redundant or we just grow old and have to retire. All of a sudden we don’t know who we are any more. We don’t have a role in life. We’ve lost our significance and with it our sense of identity.

My wife has MS. And over the years she’s had to watch all the things that once gave her such pleasure, being slowly taken away from her. When she was first diagnosed 25 years ago I asked her how she felt about it. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I know God loves me’. She still has her down days of course, but the thing is, she’s found her identity in just being a child of God. And being loved by him. And nothing can take that away from her. Neither life, nor death. She’s for ever a child of God.