Answer

Does What I Am Going Through Change Who I Really Am?

Something has happened, or is still happening, and it has started to feel like a verdict. A relationship ended. A job fell through. A faith went quiet. A choice you regret keeps coming back. When a hard season runs long enough, it stops feeling like something you are going through and starts feeling like something you are.

No. It does not change who you really are, and the reason is not encouragement. It is chronology. Who you are was settled before any of it. Every one of those things is happening to a person who already existed. None of them reaches back and rewrites what you are.

Eternal Truths

Moses was taught this in the right order, and it saved him. God showed him His works and told him he was a son of God. Immediately afterwards Satan appeared, called him “son of man” and demanded worship. Moses answered with the thing he had just been given: “Who art thou? For behold, I am a son of God” (Moses 1:1-13). He had the true definition in hand before he needed it.

Your divine nature is stated as a fact, not a reward. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches that each person is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents with a divine nature and destiny. Nothing in that sentence is conditional on your circumstances having tidied up. President Russell M. Nelson taught in “Choices for Eternity” that this identity comes first and every other label sits underneath it.

Christ already knows the inside of what you are carrying. Alma taught that the Savior took upon Himself our pains, afflictions and sicknesses so that He would know how to help us according to our infirmities (Alma 7:11-12). He is not learning your situation from a distance.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The competing definitions are persuasive because they are true, just small. You are your job. You are your relationship status. You are your struggle. Each is an accurate description. What none of them is, is foundational. The trouble starts when something temporary is asked to do load-bearing work. Young adulthood makes that worse, because so much of it feels like it is being decided permanently, and very little of it is.

Questions to Think About

• If someone asked me who I am, what would I say first?
• Which description of me is doing more work than it can carry?
• What would change today if I actually believed the first thing about me is that I am God’s?

What You Can Do

Say it out loud this week, deliberately, before you need it. People who can name who they are when nothing is wrong tend to still have it when something is. Write the sentence down and put it where you will see it on a bad morning. The essay behind this Answer explores what God sees in you that you do not always see in yourself.

Jesus Christ does not revise His view of you when your circumstances change, and He can hold the true definition steady for you until you can hold it yourself.