Where Do You Put Your Worth? A Quick Tour through Identity

Lately I’ve noticed how, in ordinary life, we play a quiet game of presentation, choosing which bits to show so we look a little like the person we hope to be, and how our feelings rise or fall with others’ responses. We shape ourselves based on the perceived expectations of those we care about. In a sense, under all our identity talk sits a quiet question: what makes me valuable?

Three Stories We Tell Ourselves about “Who I Am” — and a Fourth We Often Miss

1) Identity as given by place and people

I grew up in a small village where everyone knew each other. There was one shop, one school, two pubs. In a small village, your name and history are known, and your identity is tied to the people and the place: “She’s Tom’s mum,” “He’ll be just like his dad,” “They’ve always run the parish council.”

This post marks the beginning of a series of reflections prompted by reading Union with Christ: In Scripture, History, and Theology by Robert Letham,¹ in preparation for the BCUK 2026 conference on Union with Christ.

Where Does It All Begin?

When considering union with Christ, my instinct is to focus on the believer’s participation in Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and glorification, much like the definition found in the Lexham Survey of Theology:²