Consider the typical business card: a 31/2 x 2–inch piece of stiff paper. Name, title, contact info. But that insignificant rectangle can represent a major step into the professional world, especially when it’s your first card. Mine identified me as communications director for the Urban Systems Laboratory at a state university. Sounds impressive, right? The reality was much more mundane. I did technical editing and writing in a windowless office within a concrete-and-glass mid-rise lab/classroom building—something close to total anonymity and invisibility. But I had a title and a card to prove it. So what if I used no more than five of those first 500 business cards? I finally had a professional identity.
What I had in that card and title summed to the comforting illusion of being on the same footing as our university president or a corporate CEO. In other words, I had some small measure of professional “sameness,” which is the root meaning of identity.
Years and several other business cards later, I’ve learned that our sameness with God (in other words, being the same in quality, though not in quantity, with the Creator) is vastly more comforting. And it’s a reality that belongs to everyone, regardless of where life’s course has taken us. Our actual life-stuff is the divine Life itself. Our divine Parent equally values—yet individually designs—us.
