You Have Been Called By Name

Part 3 of a 5-part series on faith, grit, and the strength of character that only comes through hardship.

There’s a particular kind of fear that only hits when the thing you trusted most suddenly isn’t there any more.

When something looks dangerous from a distance you can prepare for it. Plan around it. Talk yourself through it. But when the fear arrives with no warning, when the ground you were standing on a second ago just… disappears. It’s different. And we need a new set of tools to deal with it.

I know that feeling physically. When a foothold crumbles. When a rope pulls loose from an anchor. When the ice gives way beneath you and your stomach drops before your body does. In those moments, your brain doesn’t have time to think. You react. And who you really are, underneath all the preparation and the confidence and the training, shows up very quickly.

But we have all felt it in life too.

When you lose your job. When your marriage breaks. When the person you leaned on lets you down. When you lose a loved one. When the doctor tells you some news that changes everything. There’s no harness for that. No safety line. No set plan to get things back on track.

And nobody teaches us how to handle it. There is no universal rescue plan.

The Identities We Build Without Realising

Most of us build our identity around a handful of things. Our career. Our relationships. The role we play in our family. Our reputation. The plan we had for how life was supposed to go.

And we don’t even realise how much weight we’ve put on those things until one of them gives way.

Someone gets made redundant and falls apart. The money can be one part of it. But sometimes people really don’t know who we are without the title. A marriage ends and one person completely loses themselves because their role in the relationship was their identity. A retired athlete stares at the ceiling and wonders what their purpose without competition is.

Here’s the hard truth: if the answer to “who am I?” depends entirely on a job title, a bank balance, a role within a family, our health, or our reputation, then our identity is standing on ground that can shift at any moment. And eventually, for all of us, it will.

I don’t mean that as criticism. It’s just reality. We all build on that kind of ground without even realising it. It’s human.

What It Actually Feels Like

My identity was shattered when I broke my back in a freefall parachuting accident. Everything changed in about half a second. One moment I was in the air, doing what I’d trained to do. The next I was on the ground with three crushed vertebrae and doctors telling me I might not walk normally again. I was twenty-one.

The physical pain was bad. But it was the loss of identity that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. I was a soldier. I was physically strong. That was the anchor. That was who I was. And suddenly, lying in a military hospital, I wasn’t that any more. I was just a young guy who couldn’t walk to the bathroom, with no idea what came next.

The first thing that happens when your identity gets stripped away is disorientation. Pure and simple. Not sadness, not yet. Just this hollow, panicky blankness. Nothing where something used to be.

There were days where I lay in that hospital bed and genuinely wondered if my best days were behind me. I had fought so hard to be in my job as a soldier. I had dropped out of uni. It had taken me 2 attempts to pass selection. I did the reservist selection so it was a year long each time. Being in the SAS was all I had at that point. I had worked hard to be where I was, I wanted it. You have to want it to be able to pass selection. And now I was marked as injured, even if I could recover I would never be deployed again in the same way I was before.

Most people who’ve had their identity pulled from under them will recognise that. The blankness. The “who am I now?” that you can’t answer. And the fear that maybe there isn’t an answer.

The Name That Doesn’t Change

Here’s where it turned for me. And I want to be straight about what actually made the difference, because it wasn’t what people might expect.

It wasn’t grit. It wasn’t mental toughness. It wasn’t deciding to fight my way back. Those things came later, and they helped. But they weren’t the foundation. They were the walls. And walls built on weak foundations collapse.

The foundation was faith.

There’s a verse in Isaiah that I try to come back to in every hard season.

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.”

Our identity doesn’t come from what we do. Not the soldier. Not the adventurer. Not the TV guy. Not the businessman. Not any of the labels the world sticks on us or the ones we stick on ourselves. God called us before we were any of those things. And He’ll still be calling us long after those labels are gone.

We are His. That’s the identity. And it’s the one thing that can’t be taken away.

God doesn’t abandon His children. He never has. Not once. Not in the whole of scripture. Not in the whole of history. He didn’t abandon Moses in the desert. He didn’t abandon David in the cave. He didn’t abandon Joseph in the prison. And He hasn’t abandoned you in whatever you are going through right now.

When I was at my lowest, when the career looked finished and the future looked blank, the only thing I had left was a quiet, trembling sense that God was still there. Honestly, I didn’t even really feel it! I just had to believe it because I had nothing else. We have to trust that He hasn’t left. That the story isn’t over, even though we can’t read the next page. This calls back to the previous part in this series, “Obedience Before Outcome.” I can’t see you, but I’m choosing to trust you.

And what’s actually useful here isn’t passive faith. It’s a warrior faith. The kind that gets you out of bed when your body doesn’t work and your future is blank and every voice in your head is telling you to quit.

We’re not called to a quiet life. We’re called to be warriors. I don’t mean chest-beating, look-at-me. Be the warrior who gets knocked down and gets back up. The kind who fights for their family, their faith, their integrity, even when it costs them everything. The kind who trusts God even when the orders don’t make sense and the terrain is brutal and the outcome is invisible.

That’s the faith that changes things. The battlefield kind. Because when you have nothing left, the God of the universe still knows your name. He has not abandoned you.

And looking back I would never have chosen that hard path, but it anchored my faith for everything that came after. Most of what has really helped me through the storms of life was built on a foundation that was laid in a hospital bed when I had nothing left but the trust that I was His.

Be Strong and Courageous

There’s a moment in the book of Joshua where Moses has just died. The greatest leader Israel has ever known is gone. And Joshua, the man who has to step into that gap, is standing at the edge of the Jordan with an entire nation behind him and absolutely no guarantee of what’s on the other side.

And God doesn’t say: take your time. He doesn’t say: grieve first, then we’ll talk. He says: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

That’s a command. From a God who knows exactly how scared Joshua is. Be strong. Be courageous. The path might not be clear, the outcome may not be certain. But God is with you regardless.

We will all have these moments where the thing we were following, the leader, the plan, the identity, the life we knew, is gone. And we’re standing at the edge of something we didn’t ask for, with no map and no guarantee. And God doesn’t say wait. He says go. I’m with you.

That’s a warrior faith. The presence of God in amongst all the fear, doubt, and uncertainty.

Rebuilding on Different Ground

After breaking my back, the doctors eventually told me I could walk. Then, slowly, that I could move properly again. And somewhere in that long, boring, painful process of recovery, a thought started forming that I couldn’t shake.

Everest.

Now, I know what some people might think. That I just swapped one physical identity for another. Soldier to mountaineer. Same anchor, different label.

But that’s not quite what happened.

Before the accident, my identity was built on what I could do. My fitness. My role. My capability. After the accident, after all of that was stripped away and rebuilt on different ground, Everest wasn’t the foundation. It was the fruit. The dream came after the faith, not instead of it. That’s a crucial distinction. Because if I’d climbed Everest to prove I was still the same guy, to earn my identity back, the summit would have felt hollow. I would have needed the next peak and the next one after that, always chasing the thing that made me feel like me.

Instead, something had already shifted underneath. My identity wasn’t “soldier” any more. It wasn’t “mountaineer” either. It was: I am a child of God, and He has a purpose for my life. Simple as that. And because of that, Everest wasn’t about proving anything. It was about following a call. Trusting that the dream had been placed there for a reason, and being willing to go after it even though I had no guarantee it would work.

Eighteen months after the accident, I stood on the summit. It remains one of the most meaningful moments of my life. Not because of the achievement. But because of where it started. A hospital bed. A broken back. A young man who didn’t know who he was any more. And a God who did.

But here’s the thing we shouldn’t romanticise. Not every crisis leads to a summit. Sometimes the rebuilding is quieter than that. Sometimes it’s just getting out of bed or asking for help when every fibre of you wants to pretend you’re fine.

And sometimes the rebuilding involves failing. Again and again. Getting it wrong. Trying something that doesn’t work. Starting over for the third or fourth time. We need to stop treating failure like the end of the story. If you are still here then you know it isn’t. Because there isnt anyone who hasn’t experienced failure, and if there is don’t worry they will! That’s life! Every failure is a stepping stone. Every wrong turn teaches us something the right turn never could. Every time we fall and get back up, we’re stronger than we were before.

The people who do remarkable things with their lives aren’t the ones who never failed. They’re the ones who failed and refused to let it define them. Who treated every setback as training ground. Who understood that the path to anything worthwhile runs straight through the things that didn’t work.

Rebuilding doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real. It just has to be honest. And it almost never goes in a straight line.

What to Actually Do

Here’s what I’ve learnt.

When life knocks us sideways, the first instinct is to scramble. Get another job. Start another project. Find another role to fill the space. Anything to stop feeling so exposed. We want to get back to normal as fast as possible.

But if we just grab the next thing without understanding why we fell so hard, we’ll just build a new house on the same sand. And when the next storm comes, and it will, we’ll be right back in the rubble wondering what went wrong.

The smart move is to take the enforced pause. Look down. And ask: what was I building on?

Nine times out of ten, the answer is the same. We made something temporary the centre of who we are. A title. A role. A relationship. A number in a bank account. Good things, all of them. But none of them were ever designed to carry the weight of our identity. That job belongs to God alone.

So we rebuild on rock. On the unshakeable truth that we are children of God. That He has called us. That He has a purpose for our lives that no redundancy, no divorce, no diagnosis, no failure can cancel. We anchor there first. Everything else gets built on top.

I know that sounds abstract. But it’s the most practical thing I’ve ever learnt. When the voice in my head says you’re finished, I come back to: God called me and He’s not done with me. When the fear says you’re not enough, I come back to: my worth was settled before I ever achieved anything. It’s a fight. A daily, sometimes hourly, fight to remember what’s true when everything around us is trying to pull us in different directions.

And when we do that, how we hold things changes. The career becomes a gift to steward, not a lifeline to cling to. The relationship becomes something to invest in freely, not something we need to complete us. Our health, our wealth, our friendships, we can hold all of it with open hands. Look after it. Enjoy it fully. Give thanks for it daily. Without being terrified of losing it. Because our identity isn’t riding on any of it. It’s riding on the One who gave it.

From there, we get moving. Get honest with ourselves, with God, with one or two people we trust. Let someone in, because isolation is where the enemy wins and community is where warriors are forged. And then take the next hill. Not the whole mountain. Not a five-year plan. Just the next hill. One step. Then another tomorrow. That’s how ground gets taken back. Not by waiting until we feel ready. By trusting the ultimate Commander and moving.

And If You’re Not in Crisis Right Now

Use this time.

I learnt something in the military that has never left me. You don’t sharpen your blade in the middle of a firefight. You sharpen it before. You train when it’s quiet and boring and nobody’s watching. You build your fitness when there’s no mission. You learn your drills when there’s no enemy. Because when the storms come, and they always do, we rarely rise to the occasion. We fall to the level of our preparation.

Faith works the same way. The people I know who stand firm when life falls apart aren’t the ones who suddenly find God in the crisis. They’re the ones who were walking with Him long before it hit. Who prayed when things were good. Who knew where to turn because they’d been turning there every day, not just on the desperate days.

So if life is steady right now, use this lull. Get strong. This is how warriors live. Ready. Prepared. Close to God and close to good people.

And if you’re reading this already in the middle of the storm, thinking I didn’t build any of that, hear this: there’s an old saying that the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The second best time is now. It’s never too late to start. God doesn’t need you to arrive prepared. He just needs you to arrive. Start the prayer today. Make the call today. Let someone in today. The foundations can still be built in the fire.

While we’re at it, wherever we are, look around. Someone near us is probably in the fight of their life right now. And they probably haven’t asked for help. Most people don’t. So don’t wait to be asked. Once in the desert on operation, we were all dehydrated, all struggling, and my sergeant discreetly handed me his last cap of water. No fuss. No audience. He just saw I needed help and acted. It meant so much, especially coming from my leader. It takes more courage than most people realise to help someone unconditionally, and to your own detriment.

Be that person for someone.

The Story Isn’t Over

One last thing before we wrap up.

If there’s a theme running through this whole series, it’s this: God doesn’t waste anything. Not the pain. Not the failure. Not the seasons that feel pointless. Not the identities that got stripped away.

The wilderness isn’t a dead end. It’s a Christ-led, wild road to becoming the person He made us to be. Everything we’ve walked through, the faithfulness when we couldn’t see the outcome, the identity that got shattered and rebuilt on better ground, all of it is preparation. Not punishment. Preparation.

For what? We might not know yet. And that’s okay. We don’t need to see the full picture. We just need to trust the One who does.

The God who called us by name isn’t finished with us. Not even close. The best chapters might still be unwritten. And the person we’re becoming through all of this, through the fire and the doubt and the getting back up, that person is stronger, kinder, braver, and more anchored than the one who walked in.

That’s what the wilderness produces. It won’t hand it to us. We have to earn it. Step by step. Day by day. Through the mud and the sweat and the tears. But it’s what we are made for.

So, if you’re reading this and your world has recently fallen apart, or it fell apart a while ago and you’re still in the wreckage wondering who you are, hear this.

You are not your job. You are not your title. You are not your role. You are not your success and you are not your failure.

You are known. You are named. You are held.

And the God who called you by name before any of those other labels existed is the same God who is with you right now. In the mess. In the silence. In the not-knowing. He has not left. He has not forgotten you. He is not standing at a distance, waiting for you to sort yourself out. He is right here. In the thick of it. Fighting for you even when you’ve stopped fighting for yourself.

He called you to be a warrior. And warriors get back up.

Never Give Up.

See you next week for Part 4: Surrender the Controls.

BG

Coming up in this series:

Part 4: Surrender the Controls — The daily fight to stop white-knuckling your life.

Part 5: What Remains — Strip away the title, the money, the reputation. What’s left? Who’s the real you?