Didn’t Realize My Pain Had Become My Identity

I don’t think this happens overnight.

I think it happens one ordinary day at a time until suddenly you realize you don’t see yourself the way God sees you anymore.

You see yourself as the divorced woman/man. The exhausted caregiver. The parent with the prodigal child. The person who can’t seem to get over what happened. The one with the diagnosis. The anxious one. The lonely one.

None of us wake up one morning and decide that’s going to become our identity. It just quietly happens while we’re trying to survive.

I caught myself doing it not too long ago.

If someone had asked me how I was doing, I would’ve answered with my circumstances before anything else. My pain had become the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I carried to bed at night. It wasn’t just something I was walking through anymore. It was becoming the way I saw myself.

I don’t think I’m the only one.

Maybe that’s why so many of us feel stuck. We love Jesus. We’re reading our Bibles. We’re praying. We’re going to church. On the outside, everything looks fine. But somewhere along the way, our pain started becoming louder than God’s truth, and we didn’t even notice it.

Then one day I caught myself doing something I wish I would’ve noticed sooner.

Every time I thought about my future, my pain answered first.

Every time I thought about who I was, my pain answered first.

Every time I read a promise in Scripture, my circumstances argued back.

That’s when it hit me.

I could genuinely love Jesus... and still let my suffering tell me who I was.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

I hope you don't recognize yourself in what comes next. I did. And I honestly think seeing these seven warning signs changed the way I'll walk through suffering for the rest of my life.

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