When God the creator breathed life into you, a new being was born. There was no one like you before and there will be no one like you again. There is and always will be only one you (unless we start cloning, and that’s another topic for another day). Throughout my life I have been involved with various methodologies to understand and unpack who I am as a person. Some of my favorites are the Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, and Enneagram. With each of these methods, one answers a series of questions, and in the end hopefully you understand a little more about how you relate to yourself, others, and the world.
Probably the most helpful to me has been the Enneagram. You can answer the questions online and it doesn’t take very long. Like most methods, you can choose to do a shorter or a longer version, and one can spend a great deal of time trying to unpack everything. The idea behind all of these is not to put us in some type of box, but to help us see the box from which we experience the world.
In my family, we each have a different Enneagram number, which means that not one of us has the same personality type. My wife is a Helper. My sons are a Loyalist, Perfectionist, and Achiever. I am the Enthusiast. We’re all very different, yet we’re all family. We each bring our own way of seeing, doing, and feeling to every situation.
The same is true with the body of Christ. In 1st Corinthians we hear that the body does not consist of one member but of many. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each of them, as he chose.
As church and as family, we celebrate the uniqueness of you. You may not be perfect, but you’re perfectly YOU. Embrace who you are, claim the person God created you to be, and then join the rest of us with all of our weird and quirky personalities as we learn to be church together.
In God’s Peace, from a called and ordained Enthusiast
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