She didn’t steal my heart, but chart-topping 27-year-old country singer Ella Langley stole my ears and my attention this past summer with a song that captures the reality of a pressure we all feel from time-to-time. It’s that pressure from without that fuels an all-consuming fight within. The chart-topping performer’s tune, “Be Her”, confesses that longing we have sometimes (or all-the-time?) to be someone else. . . someone who we don’t think we already are. I’ve felt it. You’ve felt it. And, our kids certainly feel it as they desperately seek to answer the question, “Who am I?”

In today’s world, the negative cultural narrative on identity that pounds our kids, convinces them, and is destroying them, is the one that Ella Langley has believed. Yet, watching the object of her song (“she” and “her”) leaves her yearning to escape from that all-consuming negative cultural narrative that’s all about presenting a desired self, keeping up appearances, and basically living into who our social media world wants us to be as opposed to who we’ve been created to be. Whether she knows it or not, Ella Langley, like all of us, is crying out to be who she was created to be. Among other things, Langley’s positive role model is living a life marked by moderation, integrity, commitment to her spouse and children, faith in Jesus, truth-telling, and being satisfied with what she has. That’s what Langley desperately wants as she sings, “I just wanna be her so bad, it hurts so bad. . . Don’t want all this drama, give me something real/Trade a mile high to walk one in her heels/Take all my money, everything I have/I just wanna be her so bad.”

If we take seriously God’s call on our lives to raise our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, one of our primary responsibilities is to help them find their identity in who they are as Divine image-bearers who also, when they come to faith in Jesus Christ, are adopted sons and daughters of God. What could be better and more freeing than that? But even for our kids who do come to faith, navigating the identity question in today’s negative world is a difficult venture.

While Ella Langley leaves listeners wondering if she will shed the shackles of that old self in order to embrace an identity and lifestyle of the “her” she yearns to be, we need to help our kids see and embrace the life-giving and freeing “What now?” identity path God has laid out for those who have come to faith in Jesus Christ. In his letter to the Colossians, the Apostle Paul helps us see what it means to live out what it means to “have been raised with Christ” and now united to Him by faith (Colossians 3:1-17). In essence, this is what we need to long for consistently and live out daily by God’s grace and help. This is who we need to be. So, how do we help our kids live into this way of living?

First, teach your kids to “seek the things that are above” and to “set their minds on things that are above.” Paul says this upward looking requires that we take our attention and allegiance away from the “things that are on earth.” We have died to those earthly agendas, commitments, idols, and identities. Instead, we need to refocus all of our faculties on looking for and thinking about God’s will and way for our lives. Parents, we can begin by reading and studying Scripture together in our homes, and then teaching them to read, study, and meditate on the Bible themselves. God’s Word will set them straight as they learn to discern Truth from lies.

Second, teach your kids to “put to death therefore what is earthly” inside themselves. This is a life-long process rather than a once-and-done step. As followers of Jesus who still struggle with our sin natures, our kids need to know that they will battle with sexual immorality, impure/immoral behavior, passion (lust), evil desires, and selfish greed. In addition, Paul piles even more on that garbage heap of things we’re to “put away” or “rid ourselves” of. . . a host of things that come from our lips including anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy talk, and lies. Parents, this requires us to confess and address our struggles with our sinful selves, modeling a lifestyle of struggling to rid ourselves of these things, and graciously help our kids see and address each of these “old self” sinful tendencies when they rear their ugly heads in their lives. In essence, we are to walk with our kids as fellow strugglers and pilgrims in the faith.

Finally, teach your kids to lean into God’s grace and provision as they put on the “new self.” As God helps us to shed our old selves, He calls us to live into a new identity that is marked by compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness of one another, and love. Again, living into this reality is a life-long process and struggle. But it is what our Savior has called us to, and He will do this good work in our children as they mature in their faith. Parents, our role, once again, is to model and teach this identity-transforming new way of life!

Listening to Ella Langley’s “Be Her” brings to mind the old nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, that fragile egg who tumbled off the wall and was irretrievably broken. Following the cultural narrative on identity sends us tumbling, shattering us if we believe it and embrace it. But the good news is that we are not irreparable. Rather, in His grace, kindness, mercy, and love, our King – the Lord Jesus Christ – makes us new. We don’t have to only long like Langley to become something new. We can in effect ‘be Him’ as He transforms us into His image and identity… which is what we all long for in the first place!