Maybe We Are All Lost Socks

a few thoughts on identity and denying self

Sitting in the middle of my kitchen table right now is a laundry basket full of single socks. We are not talking about a few socks whose mates seemed to have walked away, but an entire laundry basket full of gray, white, striped, brightly colored, sad, lonely, little socks. Most of them have been in the basket for months. 

I have no earthly idea where the lost socks go. At this point, I assume we have some sort of sock-eating gremlin who has made himself at home in our attic, who comes out at night to feed once the socks have been peeled off sweaty boy feet.

But becoming lost is a little more complicated than that—for socks but even moreso for we with feet.

photo evidence of the lost sock basket

One of the questions that continues to surface since The Way of Belonging released has to do with the self. In the past, I viewed belonging only through the lens of my relationships with others. However, that’s only part of the recipe.

There’s no denying that belonging is also tightly woven to our identities, both individual and communal. How we see ourselves (or ignore ourselves) affects our inner settledness as well as how we relate with God and each other. Therefore, much of the work of belonging (especially in adulthood when our sense of “self” seems to have become muddied, foggy, or diminished) is getting to know ourselves. It’s moving from lost to found. 

However, in this pursuit of understanding the self is where the question lies: What do we do, then, with Christian idea of self-sacrifice? Is “finding ourselves” selfish? 

A verse that has come up more than once is this: “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 6:23 CSB). One reader questioned whether authenticity was the antithesis of following Jesus. “Shouldn’t the ‘self’ just disappear the more we become like Christ?”

I do not hold these questions lightly, nor do I have a tidy answer. I am acutely aware of the ways I can spend a little too long looking at myself, all the ways I am prone to caving inward or want to appear great in others’ eyes. A measure of denial is necessary to keep me from an inflated view of self, a human rendering of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. 

But also, the self is not absolutely selfish, through and through.

Also contained within the self is a sacredness, an inherited worth and desire for the communal woven into who we are from the beginning. Unlike the ostriches and grasshoppers, weeping willows and mighty oaks, the Divine got intimately involved with the creation of humankind. Crafted with his own hands and breath, God made people who contained his likeness and then looked upon the “selfhood” of the first people and declared, “It is very good indeed” (Gen. 1:31 CSB). That worth and want of connection echoes within us still. 

Yes, sin entered the picture and left its scars—in the story of creation, but in each of our stories as well. Like a little gremlin, it’s still doing all it can to keep us lost, disconnected from God, each other, and ourselves. It’s doing its best to keep us hidden and in the dark. But I have a hard time believing that “deny yourself…and follow” is a call to abandon self-knowledge altogether. I think of how much harm I could do, especially in my relationships, without an honest look at all my vices and virtues. I think of how slow I am to confess or pursue restitution without a clear understanding of what lies within.

Rather, I tend to think what Jesus is asking is not avoidance but surrender, a change of posture so that we do not pursue self as king, but as the place where we are found.

In this way, who we are is not an end, but more like a map pointing us Home. It’s where we encounter, in real time, both the broken and beloved parts of ourselves in God’s presence and where surrender is not a diminishment of the self but a space to exhale, to realize we do not have to try so hard or run so far to claim belonging as our own.

Maybe we are all just lost socks.¹ And God doesn’t want us to deny that we are socks or begin pulling at threads in order to turn us into something else. Rather, he wants to reach down into the truest parts of who we are and turn us right side out, until we are not only found but formed more and more into his likeness and more and more into our fuller self—yes, for his glory, but also for our common good.

“Genuine self-knowledge begins by looking at God and noticing how God is looking at us.”
–David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself

“...we are born with a seed of self-hood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness—an encoded birthright of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as years go by, but it never abandons us.”
–Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

“...it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell.”
–Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

“I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love,  may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
—Ephesians 3:17-19 CSB

1. I first used this lost socks metaphor in The Way of Belonging, but the more I have thought about it, the more I see the parallels between identity development and spiritual formation. The more I believe they are not at odds.