Identity is too heavy a weight for children to bear alone

Identity is too heavy a weight for children to bear alone.

When kids are seen as being rather than becoming, the “act of self-creation” is both more urgent and less thoughtful. Identity is a decision for you and you alone—nobody can tell you who you are. 

Or who you aren’t. In fact, if you decide you’re a boy in a girl’s body or a permanent victim of an oppressed group, any challenge to that position is an assault on your very being. Idols are heavy, whether gold or oak or personal identities. In these last days we’ve devised the heaviest of all: the burden of self. To tell adolescents “You are enough,” “You are perfect,” “Follow your dream and live your truth” is to weigh them down with expectations they can’t begin to meet.

“These things you carry are borne as burdens on weary beasts,” says the Lord to Israel of their idolatrous ways. “Listen to me, O house of Jacob: ... even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save” (Isaiah 46:1, 3-4). Identity is a burden even grown-ups were not made to bear alone. No one entirely knows himself; it’s the Lord who knows, and the Lord who carries. May our overburdened youth find Him before it’s too late.

—Janie B. Cheaney (Born 1950, Christian writer).