On the outside, one may say that I have my life pretty well together. After all, I’ve done well in school, should be graduating without debt, and have promising career options ahead of me. By any standard, this is what success at this stage of life looks like, right? I mean, what else is there to ask for?

What if I told you that all of the above things have lost their value to me? Now, I do not mean this in some kind of existential nihilistic way. They are still important facets of my life. What I do mean is that these standards of success are not where I get my intrinsic value from. If these standards are not where I get my sense of self-worth from–my identity–then what source or sources do I draw from? Before I get into that, a little personal background is needed for any of this to make a lick of sense.

Being the youngest of four siblings, I felt I always had to prove myself while growing up. Must have been something about trying to be viewed as an equal to my older siblings. Regardless, this motivation propelled me to greater heights in everything I did. In football I out-worked everyone else on the field (but admittedly was out-performed, despite moderate success). High school academics yielded a similar story. I knew that I wasn’t the most athletic, smartest, or handsomest guy on the block, so the only way I felt I could stand out was simply to try the hardest to appear as if I had it all together. When it came to video games, which I admittedly spent way too much time playing, I was one that plunged into fits of anger when I felt I wasn’t matching up. I’d actually like to apologize to anyone I hurt because, well, I took everything a little too seriously when I was younger, including myself. I kid you not, one time I even raged so much over losing in a video game that I threw a nasty kidney punch at a friend (sorry, Dan). I actually did stuff like that. I was that guy. It gets worse, much worse. Upon receiving a calculus test grade that dismantled my 4.0 GPA my junior year of high school, I felt like I had utterly failed everyone. My idealized standard of perfection that I had erected for myself was shattered, and with that, I fell down broken and defeated. 

I wish I could tell you that it ended there, but it didn’t. I told you that I took myself too seriously, right? While this sharp-edged blade of self-perfecting passion allowed me to pierce deep into the heart of perceived success, I fell short yet again. Football, the sport I had lived nearly my entire life for up until that point, was over. As my senior year drew to a close, I didn’t receive any Division 1 offers. I simply wasn’t good enough and got concussed too much, and all of that was a tough horse-sized pill of humility I had to swallow. After I inwardly blamed my parent’s genetics for not allowing me to be Bigger, Faster, and Stronger than my competition, I faced the reality of my limitations and moved on. I was still determined to be the best at whatever I felt my calling was going to be, I just didn’t know what that calling was yet.

So, what do so many people seem to do when faced with uncertainty upon graduating high school? You guessed it–I join the military. Though, so far in the Navy I must say that I still have not sailed the seven seas (cue The Village People)…but that’s a different story. While perhaps a different story, I was still too much the same. I was determined to be the most fit and squared-away sailor I could be as a means of proving myself. I do believe now that this was half the reason why I was trying so hard to get into the Navy SEAL program, though my anger towards the injustice ISIS was flaunting comprised the other half. Concurrently to this physical and mental preparation, I pushed myself to academic achievement in physics. While trying to prove myself and stand out as successful, I was desperately clawing for satisfaction through the accolades I received from friends, family, professors and superiors in the Navy. In the midst of having academic success, a wonderful and loving girlfriend, a high fitness level, proud parents, and so much more, my fingers clawed at thin air and my soul was groaning that this wasn’t enough. In fact, none of it was. None of the words or awards from others about my perceived success made me full. I felt empty. If none of these wonderful things in life could fill me–could fill this void within me–then what could? My heart groped for answers…

Well, I didn’t receive an epiphany while glooming in some dark hole at rock bottom. I never quite hit rock bottom. Rather, I just realized the life I had been living had been something of a meaningless charade. I realized that for my entire life I had been treading paper in the space between the words–the words that defined who I was and what I was living for. What was I living for? What was the meaning behind all of this? There must be something meant for me to be. There must be something so much more than just myself. There must be something so much more than what I was seeing and experiencing–something I just wasn’t grasping. I felt a pull towards seeking something greater, though, for once it wasn’t something to make myself feel greater or worthy.

Though he hardly remembers this conversation, my dear friend Ben Matthews sparked something inside of me that has has since completely changed the course of my life. He told me to seek out the answers I so desperately needed in a place where I had been exposed to my entire life. The church. The thing was, I had already considered myself to be what I thought was a Christian my whole life. However, as a kid, I embodied this Christian image because that’s who my parents wanted me to be, not because I had a desire to have a personal relationship with God. To be completely honest, I viewed God as some kind of fun-killer who set incredibly high standards on Christians and I viewed the Church as a place where conservative and well-meaning religious folk congregated to worship this God. All that said, I felt that I knew God existed and to gain approval I was willing to appear to my parents and others in the church that I was living an exemplary Christian life. Prove your worth and gain acceptance–see a common theme, here?

So while I was knowledgeable about what it meant to be a Christian and about God, my faith was superficial. I had not really experienced God for myself, I had only Sunday school stories from the Bible and second-hand experiences of from others in order to paint a picture of God. Most of all, I had questions pertaining to the nature of God that needed to be answered before I could sell myself out for this Jesus guy. For example, I secretly had some of the same questions that a great, philosophical friend of mine posed to me like “If God is all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful, how could he allow so much pain and suffering in this world that He created?” Furthermore, I was (and still am) someone who values science as a means of obtaining answers from the universe we live in. I was able to easily see that our intricately complex and beautiful universe pointed to a designer, but I questioned how the ~6,000 year timeline the Bible gives us could align with the much larger time-scale that science gives. Does that even matter? Again, I needed answers–and to more than just these basic questions.

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” – Matthew 7:7-8.

I decided to take Ben’s advice to examine with a new lens what had been before me my entire life. I decided to join this class at church called Journey. This class not only peered into the Bible for answers and what it actually means to be a Christian, but it also scraped up all the ugly, burdensome areas of my life I was dragging with me. It was during this time of painful introspection that I realized the foundations I was building my identity on were fragile and unfulfilling. Achieving my definitions and standards of success could never make me whole or satisfy the longing I had deep inside of me. None of it could. I recognized only then that exclusively God alone could fill that God-sized void in my soul. However, I still had all this junk in my life I felt was weighing me down. Junk like egotistical pride, anger, sexual sin, greediness–all sources of sin that I thought was putting a massive chasm between me and God. I couldn’t hide anything from God or fake a good outward appearance, and that made me afraid. How could someone like me be worthy of having an intimate relationship with God? How could He accept someone like me? Again, high standards yet low grace for myself.

I felt like a dropped a piece of fruit in the sink or on the floor. Most of the time we just throw it away–it can have some pretty nasty and/or ugly things on it that we’d rather not have in our bodies. But what I learned about the nature of God changed everything: when we have fallen in sin or have a lot of dirt in our lives, God doesn’t just throw us away, He washes us off, He purifies us and then He enjoys us as we become part of His body, His Church. He accepts me as I am–the pride, the pain, the questions and the sin don’t matter anymore–all due to what Jesus did by taking my place on the cross. He died for my sins and thus bridged that expansive chasm between me and God. After 20 years of never showing myself an ounce of grace, this was the only grace I needed.

I’d be lying to you if I said everything was peachy after I said a prayer to one day get into heaven and eat some sky-cake with Jesus. No, being a Christian–more specifically: a follower of Christ–can be difficult. Despite being shown an immense amount of grace for an immense amount of sin in my life, there were (and are) still things in my life I need to work on. These “things” being habits, attitudes, and tendencies that, if left unchecked, not only destructively hurt others and myself but also go against the very nature of this new framework God was trying to instill in me.

Sounds like that checklist and those high standards I mentioned earlier, right? Sure, on the outside that’s exactly what it looks and Christian culture does a pretty good job of making it look that way. The difference between what I thought that looked like before and what that looks like now is that, objectively speaking, it actually makes sense. Bear with me. What is mean is that, if God’s children, who out of an overflow of love for their God and Savior and through an outpouring of the grace they were shown, are to genuinely show love to the world, then some kind of genuine change needs to happen inside of them. In order to truly “love your neighbor as yourself” and exhibit the fruits of the Spirit (“…love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”), then I must authentically change from the inside out and now I authentically wanted that change. After all, we live in a world with an incredible amount pain, suffering, and conflict. Parkland, Florida–need I say more? If there’s anything I can do to alleviate that suffering; that is, by showing those around me the grace and love of a Savior, then I’m on board. However, I can only truly be on board if I get off the train that leads me down destructive paths.

So began this internal transformation process. So far it has been a slow, painful but all the more real process that, when I look back to see how far I’ve come, I’m astounded. What’s more, I can’t even see the horizon of how far I need to go yet–like a body of water where you cannot see land on the other side. There are so many areas I need growth in, so much sin, so many faults. I am far from perfect and am humbled, daily, when I screw up. In that failure, however, I’m daily humbled by the grace God has shown me. Instead of beating myself about these failures, as I would have impulsively done before, I realize that there is nothing I can do or could have done to earn the grace that God gives me. Nothing. It’s freely given. There are no good works I can do to earn an “atta boy” slap on the back from Jesus and a larger slice of the sky cake. No, that’s just not how it works.

In some ways I’m still the same old Aaron. That is, I’m still a pathetic try-hard. But this time, instead of trying hard to live for myself, I try to live for others. But this is much easier said than done, as the battle between being inherently selfish and sacrificially selfless is often lost. However, I realize that the greatest thing I can do in this life is to invest in and add value to others in whatever way I can. That’s how I show love–that’s how I reflect what has been done to me through others and through Christ.

Back to the question I posed near the beginning of this novella that you are somehow still reading: What do I draw my sense of worth from or put my identify in? It’s simple: Jesus Christ. I am a son of the Living God through Jesus Christ and I will live my life accordingly. It’s actually that simple. Where I have great things still going for me–all things I’ve been richly blessed with and don’t rightfully deserve, it’s all just temporary. It’s a temporary means to an end and purpose: An end and purpose filled with so much love, joy and hope that transcends my current understanding and the current facade of having my life well together.