December 15, 2014

Editorial

God alone knows who we really are. We do not, Alexander Pope insists, despite our powers of reason: “The merchant’s toil, the sage’s indolence, the monk’s humility, the hero’s pride, all, all alike, find reason on their side” (Essay on Man). We constantly imbibe our own optimistic concoctions of identity: our conceit shows both care and consistency.

But human imprecisions about identity do not issue from self-deception alone. Steve Carter’s identity crisis was the fault of his mother. And his adoring adoptive parents. And “the system” that proved inadequate after his mother disappeared forever from his father and the world, leaving her 6-month-old son with a fake name and in a stranger’s care. Growing up comfortable in a New Jersey suburb didn’t answer Steve’s questions about his birth certificate not materializing until a year after his birth, about who his real parents might be, about if he would ever find out.

He would. Eight years old when her mother and brother vanished, his sister Jennifer grew up searching for them in faces in crowds. As an adult she convinced officials to reopen investigations into the disappearances. They created a photograph of what Steve would look like now, and Steve recognized himself, at 35, in the photo he found on missingkids.com.

For most of his life Steve didn’t know who he really was. Nor do the rest of us. But confusing human reason and confused human parents do not confuse God. He knows us—before our mother’s womb, our downsittings and uprisings, all our ways (Ps. 139). He really knows us: In Jesus He became the wretchedness of our sin, identifying us and with us in ways the flattery of our own reason would fain deny. The unerring precision of divine knowledge and the unquenchable persistence of heaven’s love guarantee this: that although everyone else fails, that holy love still finds us. God alone knows who we really are.

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