If real life were like the movies----In the movies the good guy turns in his Sherriff badge so he can get the bad guy without his job (and it’s ethics) getting in the way. Even in the movies you can turn in your badge but you can’t change your identity.
I keep coming across articles about motivation. I read articles pertaining to motivation and men and motivation and positive thinking. The reading got my head spinning about motivation. The reading and one more thing got me thinking about motivation; this season’s Survivor: The Philippines.
One of the survivors this season is Lisa Whelchel from Facts Of Life. She is a professed Christian and is trying to play the game with a level of integrity. That takes us back to the badge imagery. For some Christians playing poker is decidedly difficult. You have to allow yourself to bluff. I had the same experience as a teen playing Dungeons and Dragons. To be the evil wizard meant setting aside your world-view for three hours. Easy enough for a teen, harder for a poker player—impossible on Survivor?
It comes back to identity. Identity is the person you are when no one is looking. It is the ultimate motivator. It was his identity as a preacher of the gospel that allowed John Bunyan to “choose prison and a clear conscience over freedom and a conscience soiled by the agreement not to preach.” It was his belief (later realized) that he was a modern day prophet calling Soviet Russia to account that led Solzhenitsyn to cry, “As for me, I kept silent for another reason: because those Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were too few for me, too few! Here my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200, but what about the 200 million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the 200 million.”
Ultimately it is our identity that motivates us. It is who we believe ourselves to be that denotes how we will respond to life as it bears upon us.
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