What's Your Family Identity?
Some of my favorite movies are the Bourne movies, starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, based on the Robert Ludlum novels: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum.
In the first movie, The Bourne Identity, CIA assassin Jason Bourne wakes up in a boat with amnesia. He spends most of the movie wondering who he is. He has a stack of passports, all with different names, and sets out to find someone who knows his real identity, someone who can tell him who he really is.
Until we meet Christ, we all have identity amnesia, and there are stacks of passports out there, crowds of people, ready to tell us our name, ready to tell us who we are. Then one day, we find the one who was there in the beginning, the one who wove us together in our mother’s womb. He tells us who we are in him and he gives us a new name.
Every family has an identity as well, and every family has a name. In fact, those around us will tell us we get to choose this name. There is a stack of options for your home that the world freely offers. You can be the rich family with the largest house on the block. You can be the busy family whose car is only in the driveway long enough to reload before the next activity. You can be the sports family known for tailgating and March Madness. You can be the isolated family that sticks to itself. You can be the gossip family, the depressed family, the nosey family, the funny family, the garage sale family, or the game night family.
We can either take our home to the world and let it define our vision, our identity, and give us a nametag for our family to wear, or we can bring our homes to Christ and allow him to define us, give us our identity, and create a new vision within our home.
(taken from Gospel Family, p. 17-18)
