08/24/2021
By Pastor Vinnie Cappetta
"Who am I?"
There are two Vinnie Cappetta’s….the glittering image I present to the world and the real one. I guess that is why I resonate with the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem entitled:
Who Am I?
Am I really what others say about me?
Or am I only what I know of myself?
Restless, yearning and sick, like a bird in its cage,
struggling for the breath of life,
as though someone were choking my throat;
hungering for colors, for flowers, for the songs of birds,
thirsting for kind words and human closeness,
shaking with anger at capricious tyranny and the pettiest slurs,
bedeviled by anxiety, awaiting great events that might never occur,
fearfully powerless and worried for friends far away,
weary and empty in prayer, in thinking, in doing,
weak, and ready to take leave of it all.
Who am I? This man or that other?
Am I this man today and tomorrow another?
Am I both all at once? An imposter to others,
but to me little more than a whining, despicable weakling?
Does what is in me compare to a vanquished army,
that flees in disorder before a battle already won?
Who am I? They mock me these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, you know me, O God. You know I am yours.
-From A Testament to Freedom page 514
- We may feel like two different people, but let us take heart that as we are in Christ, God knows us and loves us whoever we may be…
- Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart...” Jeremiah 1:5
- For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. Psalm 139:13
- Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Psalm 139:16
- You have searched me, LORD, and you know me. Psalm 139:1
- You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. Psalm 139:2
- You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Psalm 139:3
- Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. Psalm 139:4
- I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness. Jeremiah 31:3
