Two Factors of Identity Crisis

We live in a world that has set our youth and young adults up for confusion. 

Here's how:

1. American culture is largely based on success and accomplishment. Everything about our history and our values leads us to believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make something great of ourselves. From George Washington to Jackie Robinson, our heroes, some underdogs- some just determined, are men and women who have pushed the idea of excellence to a new extreme. In the same way we have given accomplishment a very strict identity, a pay grade, and to some degree a body type. 

2. Our culture teaches students to "be who they really are." As we express to our children what matters by our culture, we tell them that they don't have to be great by anyone's standards but their own. We tell them that social norms and status quo's are meant to be broken and they can be anything they want to be. In other words we tell them that their accomplishment isn't what defines them. 

We have given young people a mixes message -a paradox- so it's no surprise that many of them (us) are confused. We tell them they can be anything, that they are perfect just the way they are, then they go to school and still get made fun of because they're not athletic or overly smart, or they still don't get recognition because they aren't pursuing normal standards of excellence. This leads young people to an inevitable identity crisis, where who they want to be and what they are expected to be collides. 

This is the crisis that youth and young adult workers find themselves dealing with on a daily basis. 

This is the reason so many teens don't know who they really are.

This is why identity in Christ is the most powerful message we can teach as Christian leaders. More than ever before our peers need to know who they are and what makes them valuable. They need to know they were made in the image of God, and the God in whose image they were made died because he thinks they are that valuable.