Month 11:6, Week 1:5 (Chamahsee/Teruah), Year 5935:293 AM
Gregorian Calendar: Sunday 29 January 2012
Ich Bin Ein Preuße
Understanding Personal Identities
"Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ) is the same yesterday, today, and forever" (Heb.13:8, NKJV).
Perhaps you are one of those, like many, who is aware that enormous shifts are taking place on our planet. In every sphere of existence, from the physical to the spiritual, huge movements are taking place. Whatever discipline you look at, from geophysics to psychic awareness, people are baffled - and not a little disorientated - by all the changes that are underway. People are searching for meaning as in no other time in recent history. Though this can be a little scary for those who like well defined zones of comfort and security, this is actually good for us, if for no other reason than it allows us to stand back and decide what is good and bad, what is permanent and what is not.
Everything in this universe changes - except Elohim (God) - which is why He is the only reliable point of reference with which to make sense of everything. It is, of course, important to identify the true Elohim (God) in order to do this as many counterfits compete for our attention and, ultimately, loyalty.
For reasons best known to Yahweh, I have been a bit of a bedouin in my life and in the process have acquired multiple identities that have coalesced over time. If variety is the spice of life then I am grateful to have dippled my metaphorical hands into it and to have brought together an interesting mix.
My childhood years gave me an Asian identity, a peculiarly Malaysian one with a strong bias toward the Chinese and, as an offshoot, the Japanese, and all of this in a British-European domestic setting. I love Chinese industry, their appreciation of and outlook on nature, and their strong family values. When I was 10 years old, I returned to my ancestral homeland of England but never really embraced it fully as was expected of me. Nevertheless I did inherit many Anglo-Saxon characteristics - a sense of fair play, love of liberty, and the ability to resist provocation, which has had both a good and bad effect of making me a little slow at times at mobilisation into action. But, like my ancestors, when I get going, nothing stops me until the goal has been attained.
Moving to Norway and Sweden enabled me to reject something I had always disliked about the British, and instead accept something I have always admired about the Scandinavians, and that is the lack of class consciousness. I also love and readily identify with the easy-going and informal nature of Scandinavian ways, something I could never find in Britain. Anglo-Saxons - whether British or American - tend to be stressed out and find it difficult to relax in my experience. In Scandinavia I discovered how to relax and wouldn't swap it for anything else.
There are two other strong country influences in my life that have dramatically shaped my personality, perhaps the more interesting because neither of them currently exist in a political sense but are very real to me more as an ideal. As such, then, I have had to actively seek them out to make them real - I did not acquire any of their traits by a simple osmosis as I did in Malaysia, England, Norway and Sweden. The first, which I need not elaborate much on here because it is well known in my many writings, is my love of the classical Hebrew people, for the pure and simple reason that they were chosen by Yahweh to represent the spiritual ideal even if they monumentally failed. I therefore look up to many of the biblical greats as characters worthy of emulation because they were men and women filled with the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit).
The last who have strongly influenced my personality is the object of a mixture of mockery and sometimes hostility from those who have little understanding of this much maligned people, the truth of whom has been grossly distorted by propaganda. I speak of the Prussians. And because there is so much ignorance about them, I have created a website about them and their nation - especially see, Prussianism: A Lifestyle, An Instinct, A Compulsion. If you're curious to know more, you can read the articles I have written about them. When American General Patton (whom I also admire, in spite of his eccentricities - I am, after all, a bit eccentric myself) described them as "the last decent people in Europe", I wanted to know more. Now I know what he meant. Accordingly, when people ask me who I am, I tell them:
"Wô shì zhóngguó rén - I am Chinese, I am English (with a dollop of Irish), Jeg er norsk - I am Norwegian, Jag är svensk - I am Swedish, and Ich bin ein Preuße - I am a Prussian".
I am proud to be all of these. These I have set in a Hebrew matrix and have become who I am - in Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ). The exciting thing is that nothing is static and things are constantly changing as I try to yield more and more to Messiah so that He can change me into who He wants me to be. So these labels - Chinese, English, Norwegian, Swedish, Prussian and Hebrew - are really just approximations or rough handles. In the final analysis I am in Yah'shua (Jesus).
You, like me, are utterly unique. You are or have become what you are because of what you have chosen to identify with. I know of no perfect country and long ago stopped searching for one. Though I love my countries, and believe in the nation state, I am not a nationalist but an internationalist. I feel at home wherever I go, some more than others to be sure, because I find much good that is worthy of emulation and admiration in all of them. One day I want to search out more of my French roots, something that has been tugging inside of me for sometime, and to Normandy where my ancestors came from on their journeys across Asia and Europe centuries ago.
I pray that you discover who you are - your identity - with a word of counsel: you'll never know who you are really until you have yielded your life to Messiah Yah'shua (Jesus) - then you will know who the eternal you is and not the fleeting psychic identity we sweep up in our journey through mortality.
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