”The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self Esteem” - Part Two Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

“Who Am I?”  What the Question Evidences
“Who am I?”  The question seems a bit overused these days.  It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream.  In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are as a means of living in awe of what God wrought within us.  Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to the contrivances of whatever trend is currently trending in the culture.  It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world.  
The question of ‘who we are’ suggests that we’re exercising our intellectual acumen to probe our existence.  That exercise itself lends weight to the fact that we have an intellect to exercise and an existence to live it out in.  By its very nature the question of ‘who we are’ poses the thesis that we are something other than being nothing, and that ‘something’ has relevance when ‘nothing’ doesn’t.  By asking the question we reveal the need that we possess to believe that we exist and that our existence is purposeful.  We want to believe that we are supposed to become ‘something’ rather than float around being ‘nothing’ going nowhere in the going.  To ask the question is to evidence the fact that we are beings in need of asking the question.  And that in and of itself evidences the incredible depth and unparalleled richness of our humanity.
In addition, the question of ‘who we are’ also suggests that a simple answer is simply not suitable.  That some cheesy pabulum will not suffice.  That the definitions proposed by innumerable philosophers and those who for centuries have probed the inner-workings of life aren’t quite enough.  That holding ourselves up against everyone else in order to grasp some sense of who we are by comparing ourselves to who everyone else is simply repeatedly comes up short.  That aligning with political hashtags or running off after a litany of causes that have caught the wandering eye of those without a cause don’t answer the question.  That even though we’ve gorged ourselves on self-help philosophies and immersed ourselves in the rigors of mindfulness (or any one of the many other popular contrivances) we still don’t have the answer.
And that is not necessarily that all of these things are incorrect or that they don’t speak something of truth into our lives.  It’s not that at some level they don’t have some sort of value.  It’s that they’re not enough.  The cumulative weight of their collected insights falls short.  Mankind has asked the question of “Who am I”? for as long has mankind has existed.  And yet in the end, we don’t have an answer that explains the whole of who we are.  After untold millennia we are still on this search and we are still asking this question.
And if all of this evidences anything at all, it evidences the depth of our depth.  It speaks to the innate and persistent complexity of who we are.  Stored within the body, mind and soul of each of us there is a vastness that all of the combined explorations of mankind have yet to fathom, much less understand.  And can we not correlate this complexity and depth with our value?  Everything in existence has value for the place that it holds in relationship to everything else in existence.  But we stand apart in complexity, intellect, reasoning and ability.  We have been equipped for and tasked with the responsibility to care for everything else and nothing else has been assigned that role…except us.  Indeed, does this not evidence our value?
 
How Do We Not Know?
The ever-baffling fact regarding the question of ‘who we are’ is that we live with ‘us’ every single solitary day of our existence.  Yet, e