What's new?

I subscribe to a great online ezine that sends me weekly articles ("Weekly Refill" is what it's called).  I LOVE these little articles and often repost them on Facebook so that my friends can enjoy them, too.

The most recent one I got was entitled, "What's new?"  The author went on to talk about how much she hated this question and how many times she was asked this question due to the new year beginning.

How do you even begin to answer that question?  Should you be honest and vulnerable and actually SHARE what's new?  Or should you just say, "Oh nothing much.  And you?" (Frankly, most of the time most people would rather tell you about themselves than hear about what's new with you anyway.)

But this reminded me of a recent discussion I was part of with a group of women that I really like.  Most of us are 40-50 something (age wise) and some of us don't work outside the home, yet we don't have small children that we are home caring for any more.  So the question we are so often asked (and so often dread) is, "What do you do?"

As if what I DO defines WHO I am.

After the answer of, "Oh I stay home," we all felt like it was necessary to apologize or explain why we stayed home without small children by our sides. See, so many of us had defined ourselves as "mom" for so long that when our little chicks left the nest, we really weren't sure how to describe who we are anymore.  Though we are still "moms", we don't have the responsibility of much of the mom responsibilities we had when our kids were very young.  We were all frustrated that we even had to feel the need to apologize that we stay home (as if we are doing nothing!).

Frankly, we are all busy with many tasks that we couldn't do when our kids were younger.  And besides that, what we do does in no way define who we are.  We all laughed and decided that we should reply that we are "sojourners seeking after Jesus" or "women learning to love others the way Jesus did" or something like the first 2 options.  Because honestly, that's WHO we are.  Women who are being made into the likeness of Jesus day by day - some days more and some days, well not so much depending on our willingness to cooperate with God's chiseling in our lives.

So what we do does matters because we are endeavoring to follow hard after Christ, but who we are matters so, so much more. And whose we are (Christ's) matters even more.

For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)


**If you'd like to read the article I reference at the beginning, you can read it here.