You Are a Work in Progress

Do you know who you are? Do you know who you really are? God doesn’t create people with cookie-cutter templates. While you bear His image and can share characteristics with others, you are unique. Even if you don’t see it, everyone around you does. You are a composite of how God made you, how life changes you, and how sanctification remakes you.

God Made You

First, remember that God made you. There’s no one else quite like you. God knit you together in your mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13). His design is remarkable and wondrous (Ps. 139:14). Before you ever lived out a day, God wrote every one of them in a book (Ps. 139:16). Your existence and design and not accidents. Yes, He determined the color of your skin, eyes, and hair. He decisively made you either male or female (Gen. 1:27). 

Your external attributes are noticeably distinguishable among all those around you, but so are your personality traits. When considering this fact of your design, differentiate between His good design and our sinful tendencies. God might have made you ambitious, but He didn’t make you angry. If left unchallenged, ambition can turn to anger when we don’t get what we want. God is not responsible for our sin — we are. God is responsible for specific dynamics that make your personality unique. Your distinct quirks are often gifts to accompany your calling.

God set you apart for His purposes even before He designed you (Jer. 1:5). Consider the order there. God decided what He wanted you to do and then designed you to ensure you could do it. He didn’t work with what He had; He worked for what He purposed. That means that you were designed for certain things but not for others. If you attempt tasks you aren’t created to do, you will be frustrated and so will others. God establishes your steps (Ps. 37:23), so you must ensure you are not working against Him. 

Life Changes You

Second, realize that life changes you. The years afforded to you have been wrought with twists and turns. The fact that you are reading this paragraph means that you made it through up to this point, but you didn’t make it unscathed. Challenges of life interrupt us without seeking our permission, and we are different because of it. Your story collides with events both near and far. Whether it was that unfortunate loss, surprising disaster, or ongoing conflict, we walk forward but often with a limp.

There’s no way to overstate how much your home life has colored who you are. Whether your family was good, bad, or indifferent, you pull a trailer full of baggage everywhere you go. If your home was a good environment, you expect all relationships to be similar. If it was a dysfunctional environment, you will have difficulties establishing trust with others. Those formative family relationships set us up to interact with others in nuanced ways.

In those formative years, you moved to and from your home base. Those relationships along the way provide relational expectations, even if you are unaware of them. Our reactions are altered by our interactions with the nurturing educator, school bully, driven coach, intentional mentor, dramatic friend, and many other characters along the way. Our responses and reactions have been tweaked through the years as we sought peace amid varying circumstances. God made us a particular way, but life has changed us.

Sanctification Is Remaking You

Finally, consider how sanctification is remaking you. God designed you, and life changes you, but the story isn’t over there. We were made to be like God, but sin tempted us to be God. Sanctification helps restore us to our original design. Our journey of sanctification consists of every moment after salvation until glorification. We are to gradually become more like Him until we are finally like Him.

With that theological concept in mind, we must remember that we are all works in progress. Who you are today will not be who you will be tomorrow. We change, we vary, and hopefully, we make progress. Part of that progress is catalyzed by learning how to be like Jesus among people who are not. It means trying to respond like Him even when we don’t feel like it. 

Jesus will use the people around you to make you more like Him. Sometimes, we are inspired by people we desire to emulate. Other times, we are challenged by relationships that force us to decide how to respond. While avoiding any complicated relationship may be easy, Jesus is prone to using those tense connections to produce good results in us. 

You are a work in progress. So if you aren’t what you hoped to be, be encouraged that God isn’t done with you yet.