One thing I love about the personality assessment, Clifton StrengthsFinder, is that it reveals how unique a person truly is! The assessment reveals what your top 5 talent or strength themes are out of a possible 34. According to Gallup’s research, to find someone with the same top 5 themes that you have, in the same order is one in over 33.3 million. Thus, there’s only about 250 people in the world with your top 5 themes in your theme order. To go further, Gallup also says that to find someone with the same top eight themes in your same order is one in over 77 billion. So, at this moment, you are a unique person on this planet. No one exists who is just like you!

Today, I read a devotional by Billy Graham. He begins by telling that the first astronauts were required to give twenty answers to the question, “Who are you?” Can you give twenty answers to that question? What kind of answers would you give? Do you know who you really are? Graham writes, “Scientists agree that our desperate search leads all humans to seek heroes and to imitate others, to ‘paste bits and pieces of other people on ourselves’.” What Graham means by that is we imitate others in the way we do things. Yes, we learn by doing, but instead of doing it through our own creativity, we try to act or be like someone else. For example, do you know someone who tries to drive like a Nascar driver on the freeway? Do you know an armchair quarterback who thinks he makes better decisions than the one on the field?

The problem of imitating and trying to be like others is that our true self that God created does not come out. There are many passages, like Psalm 139:13, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb…” God intimately knows us because he uniquely created us! By imitating others, we do not honor the way God created and gifted us.

Graham concludes the devotional by writing, “Consider this: there are three of you. There is the person you think you are. There is the person others think you are. There is the person God knows you are and can be through Christ.” As you go through this day, seek God to understand and be the person you were created to be. Nobody can do things just like you do!

Jeff Glass