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Spirit-Led Identity Change
In this chapter, I will illustrate what I have written in previous chapters by sharing another example of an identity change: While I was in college, I came up with an idea for writing a software program that would help programmers write code, and the hope of being able to work on that program became something of a “dream job” for me. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of anyone who was working on it, so I took a job in another area.
Then sometime around 1984, I found out about a small group in the company where I worked that had teamed up with a university professor to write the exact program I had envisioned. I quickly joined them and dove into the research. Then after about a year, I was made the team leader with control over the technical decisions. It all seemed perfect. God was bringing everything together to allow me to express my heart on my job.
My sense of identity was pleased!
About a year later, in 1986, a large project at our company ran into trouble, and my “dream job” was moved to a different location so our team could be transferred to the large project. Though I had the opportunity to move to the new location, I chose not to. I felt the Lord wanted me to keep my family near our extended family and our church, so I passed the work on to others and accepted the new assignment with the large project.
My sense of identity was denied – and this was about to become a cross to bear!
I made that choice because I believed it was the right decision – and I still believe it was. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the wisdom to handle the new job without working through a great deal of emotional turmoil. During one of the first meetings, a spokesman for the project tried to encourage us about our new assignment. When he gave time for questions, I asked if management realized that we felt like we were being moved to a sort of “programming slave plantation.” He laughed and said they did.
My comment was meant to be funny, but it also showed the sarcastic resentment growing in my heart. Fury was building over what I had lost and what I now had to live with.
I hated the new job, and after a few weeks I fell into a state of irrational rage (which, as I mentioned before, is a symptom of a tendency toward Borderline Personality Disorder[26]). I was no longer able to find the wisdom to keep my heart under control, and I fought daily to keep my actions from following suit. The fruits of the Holy Spirit that I expected to be in my life (love, joy, peace …) had somehow gone missing, and I wasn’t sure why.
I had entered into an identity crisis, and my heart quickly became like that out-of-balance bicycle wheel I mentioned in chapter 3. It spun painfully, demanding that I either quit the job or medicate myself to not care about it. When I chose to instead endure, my emotions flailed about, unable to find stability. Where previously I had found my identity in being the “creative guy” who pushed limits and found better ways to work; I now had to learn how to become the “company guy” who fit in with others and dutifully followed rules.
My heart rebelled against this with a fervor that frightened me. I was trying to become someone I felt I wasn’t, and I had to fight with all of my might to not let that turn me into an angry jerk.
How could this be happening in spite of my relationship with the Lord? The Bible told me to do all things without complaining and disputing (Philippians 2:14). I was supposed to obey with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord (Colossians 3:22). Yet I sat in my office day after day unable to concentrate, wasting hours as I tried to come to grips with seething rage.
I had never wanted to have a steady job to start with. I wanted to be a freewheeling artist. In spite of this, I found that I could do well in the field of software development, because writing computer code can feel (for me at least) like artwork. This was especially true when I pushed technology forward and laid a foundation for the future.
My new job was the opposite of that. It used a technology that was so out of date that it seemed impossible for me to feel creative or have any sort of meaningful impact. Working on it sapped inspiration from my heart. It was so difficult that the Bible’s commands about diligence felt like an unbearable burden:
Bondservants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but in sincerity of heart, fearing God. And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ. But he who does wrong will be repaid for what he has done, and there is no partiality.
Though I knew I wasn’t a bondservant (a slave), I also knew that if I got paid to do a job, I should do it. Yet how could God ask me to do that when my gut level instinct was to drop what I was doing and flee? The job made me want to lash out and break things. Instead, I had to quietly follow rules and not ask too many questions. It all seemed like such a violation of my authentic self!
Even my relationship with the Lord had never been about following rules and avoiding questions. I had turned to Him as a teenager, choosing to be different than my family, my peers, and society around me – and I did this at the age when I felt peer pressure most strongly. For me, deciding to follow Jesus had been the opposite of following rules. Yet I became convinced that He was who He said He was, and this led me to be different than those around me.
I had taken a similar approach on my job. I aimed for the long-term good, even when I could get by with short-term solutions. …And this had worked marvelously for the first seven years of my career. …Yet I was now in a situation where my approach felt all but impossible. I had to let the world around me change me rather than me trying to change it.
I wasn’t wired for that. Nothing but the grace of God was going to sustain me and bring me into the sort of inner maturity that would allow me to find the character I needed.
Task number one was to figure out what to do with the anger raging within me. I tried denying it, bringing it into the open, working with it, working against it …nothing calmed me down. When all else failed, I chose to let my anger motivate me to try to change the organization around me. Though I knew I was likely to fail, at least trying to do so kept me from doing something stupid. It allowed me to survive to fight another day, and this gave me time to come to grips with what was happening in my heart.
In a sense, I was still acting out of who I felt I was – someone who tried to press into a better future for everyone. I rode my anger like a wild horse, hoping to tame it and put it to good use. Where previously I had treated it as a clear and present temptation that I should avoid, I now grabbed hold of it. I treated it in the same way I had treated my sexuality seven years earlier (chapter 4). At that time, rather than trying to escape from my emotions, I had sought to reform them by the Spirit of God. I was now doing the same with anger.
I didn’t realize that I was once again following the six-step pattern I mentioned in chapter 4. I stood firm in God’s love and acceptance (step 1). I recognized my need to change (step 2). I continued to stand in the truth of who I was in Jesus (step 3). I also continued to devote my time to learning wisdom and doing my best to obey (step 4). This had all led to a war between who I felt my authentic self was and who God told me to be (step 5). I embraced the war while hoping God would lead me into an expression of my emotions that would match His heart (step 6).
In psychological terms, I owned my anger. I stopped treating it as if it was a foreign invader that I could purge from my being. Instead, I treated it as a gift from God that I needed to learn how to handle with wisdom and care. I stopped seeing it as the problem; instead, sin was the problem. I needed to learn how to express my anger in godly ways rather than sinful ways.
I read book after book to try to figure out some way to save myself and my coworkers from the professional damage I thought our outdated technology was creating for us. I put in long hours, sometimes devoting more time to my side project than to doing my assigned work. I also usually managed to get my work done, but at one point I began to fall behind. When my manager confronted me, I pointed out that our organization was hurting its workers. I asked him what our out-of-date employees were going to do when they had to find a new job. I was working every available minute to try to save them from their coming economic difficulties, and I didn’t know how to do much else.
I sort of believed my rhetoric, and my manager was gracious. Many months later he even asked me to share my insights with his manager to help him understand some of the problems in our organization. Nevertheless, what I was really doing was grasping for a productive way to survive my inner turmoil. I turned it into a crusade. This helped me to work through the fact that I was too emotionally crippled to just do my real assignments.
Early in this process, I was so upset that my stomach developed hiccups for the better part of several days. After more than a year, other symptoms of stress had shown up. I had sores in my throat, difficulty sleeping, and other indications that I was pushing myself too hard. It was becoming clear that I couldn’t keep going in the way I was. The out-of-balance bicycle wheel of my emotions was threatening my health.
I looked at my plan to save the organization and realized that my best efforts probably wouldn’t accomplish much. They would also require years of sacrifice on my part. There wasn’t a good enough reason to risk my health and family, so I decided to give up and head in a new direction.
Early in 1988, I asked my management to let me look for another job. Then I tried to fit in while I waited to move. I followed procedures and even started wearing a suit rather than the jeans and casual shirts I had worn for years. My crusade was over, and it was time to see if I could learn to work like others.
I had spent over a year sorting through my rage and much of it had turned into healthy motivation. I found that I was now able to do my assignments and fit in without tapping into the creative mindset that seemed to be so much a part of me. Doing so didn’t feel natural, but I could see that God was working.
I stayed in the job for about another year and did well enough that when it was time to leave, my management didn’t want to let me go. I was now a valuable part of the team, and they only let me move to another organization when we found someone from that organization to trade places with me.
As I moved to a new job in late 1988 or early 1989, I was excited to get back to using the work style that came naturally to me. I fairly quickly became a team leader and put in place a plan to implement my vision for the future. At the time, computer software tended to be written in a way where the code could only be used on the one product it was written for. I felt this was shortsighted, so I convinced my coworkers we should write the code in a reusable way that would allow it to also be used in future products.
Although my coworkers agreed with that in principle, we were in uncharted territory. They began complaining about me, which I handled by working a good deal of overtime to do the parts of the job they were uncomfortable doing.
In 1991, The product was finished on time and with good quality. Unfortunately, the review at the end of the product cycle didn’t go well for me. Although the product had good function and high quality, people complained about my leadership. They felt I didn’t communicate well enough, took the wrong approach on some parts of the code, and embraced too many risks. I ended up being passed over for a promotion.
The entire experience caused me to sit down and reevaluate what I was doing. I had accomplished my goals, but it had required so much work on my part that my relationships with Jesus and with my family had suffered. Then it hadn’t resulted in the sort of financial reward I hoped it would. Was that a sign that I wasn’t doing what God wanted me to?
I came to two conclusions. First, I believed that the entire string of events of the past few years had been orchestrated by God. He had used my work trials to transform my anger into healthy motivation, and this was a gift I treasured. It enabled me to handle far more than I had been able to handle in the past.
Second, I decided that the cost of achieving my dreams in the business world was more than God wanted me to pay. He had used the trial to transform me, but it was now time to follow Him in a different direction. I needed to spend more time with Him and my family.
I told my manager I wanted to step down from being a team leader and to change the direction of my career. I no longer wanted to pursue the same level of business success. Rather than being a leader, I would do what others told me to do (which I had learned how to do by submitting on the previous job). As I made these changes, I wrote this song:
The Life I Hoped to Gain
1. When I was young, I worked at playing sports
Baseball, bowling, swimming, and basketball
And I won trophies and was the MVP
My heart drove me to strive to give my all
I got good grades in school and graduated well
And in my job was rising high
Talked with vice presidents, had opportunities
Yet felt my spirit wither and cry
Chorus: The life I hoped to gain
Did not seem to remain
I could not attain the thing I searched for
Success could not bring peace
My soul found no release
My longing just increased more and more
And I will never cease to need you Lord
2. I’ve sometimes been a poet in the wind
A philosopher with music in my heart
And I’ve found joy in singing tales of truth
And sought for immortality in art
And I have dreamed of things that never used to be
And made them happen by my hand
And I’ve expressed myself for many eyes to see
Yet there is one thing I never planned
Chorus: The life I hoped to gain
Did not seem to remain
I could not attain the thing I searched for
Success could not bring peace
My soul found no release
My longing just increased more and more
And I will never cease to need you Lord
Bridge: So now my skills and talents, I lay them at your feet
They’re not for me; they’re for your glory Lord
My dreams and my desires – I pour them on the ground
Your dreams are all the dreaming I can afford
Chorus 2: The life I hoped to gain
Did not seem to remain
I could not attain the thing I searched for
’Cause only you bring peace
As your slave there’s release
And I will never cease to need you Lord
Yeah I will never cease to need you Lord
In the months that followed my decision to limit my career, our organization started a new project, and the new team leader realized that if I hadn’t done what I had done on the previous project, we would not have been able to move forward with the new one. The reusable code we had created made the new project possible.
As a result, I was given an award and received the promotion I had missed out on, and when yet another product was started, I was made the team leader of that one. I had several years of success on my job as a result, all without sacrificing my time with the Lord and my family.
Putting it all together, God had used my work trials to change several parts of my experience of identity. Rather than being stuck in a “freewheeling artist” identity, I was now able to discipline myself to do work I didn’t like. I was also able to make anger productive, be more confident about making long term plans, and turn down work I wasn’t called to do. I no longer needed a career to establish “who I was;” I lived for Jesus and submitted my authentic self to Him.
As a side benefit, He blessed my choice to take up my cross and follow Him with several years in which I was able to work in a way that fit me well.
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