Mistaken Identity

I have written before about a snorkeling “incident” we had in Hawaii with my husband and our two youngest kids.  They were quite young and very excited to be out in the ocean with all the brightly colored and wonderful fish.  Suddenly my husband called out to me, “Beth, bring Trey over here to see the barracuda!”  Now, I know he said barracuda, but in my mind, I heard piranha.  I’m thinking, “what is he, nuts?!  Taking our kids over near a bunch of piranha??”  I was so freaked out–I didn’t even have the sense to compute that we weren’t in the Amazon River–we were in a quiet bay in Hawaii. 

Pretty sure there are no piranha there.

But I had a bad case of mistaken identity–or rather, I had given the poor barracuda a case of mistaken identity.

This memory surfaced afresh for me last night when I prepared a nice seafood dish (no, it wasn’t barracuda), dusting it with a fine layer of paprika just to give it a pretty color and nice presentation.  When my middle daughter took a bite, she yelped.  “Ouch!  It’s spicy!”  (This is the daughter who can’t handle anything with any kick to it.)

“Oh my goodness, Cassandra,” came my impatient response.  “It’s just paprika!!  That’s not hot enough for you to even taste!”  But she continued to insist that it was hot.  Now Ivan had doused his with Tabasco, so he wasn’t going to be an accurate gauge for whether it was hot or not and I didn’t take any of the seafood, so I couldn’t either.  She actually got up, rinsed it off under the sink and then continued to eat.

Suddenly, as I sat there kind of thinking things through, I realized that I might have once again been the one who suffered from mistaken identity.   Did I grab the Cayenne pepper, thinking the bright red powdered spice was actually the Paprika?  Surely not…I had put the Cayenne pepper away, hadn’t I?  Well, with these thoughts going through my head, I got up from the table to just double check.

You know it…I had put the paprika away and had indeed sprinkled the seafood with Cayenne pepper.  No wonder she was yelping and squawking.  Poor little honey!

It reminds me of how many times we can lose sight of our own identity in Christ…accepting the whispered lies of the one who wants us to forget who we really are:  “You’re a loser…you won’t ever lose that weight…you can’t do anything right, no matter how hard you try…you are suffering from a bad case of wishful thinking…” and we accept that we are defeated before we even try.

Listening to the Voice of Truth isn’t that hard, if you just learn how.  There are a few ways that come to my mind; if you think of some other ways, please comment at the end of this note for those who will read after you.  One important way is to read in Scripture…who does God say you are? 

I am God’s child.

I am a friend of God.

I am a member of Christ’s Body.

I am a citizen of heaven.

I am born of God.

There is a list of these “I am” statements at the Freedom in Christ website:  http://www.ficm.org/whoiam.htm with Scripture reference for any of you who, like me, might suffer from mistaken identity from time to time.

Never forget that you are you are one of the ones for whom God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, so that you might have everlasting life!  Amen!