Who Are You Becoming?

Who are you becoming? This isn't a question about your career goals or five-year plan. It's deeper than that. It's about the person you choose to be in every interaction, every decision, every moment when no one is watching.

Daily I explore the most fundamental choice we all face: deciding the type of person I want to be in the world.

My dad was a man who lived by conviction, even when it cost him everything.

At 18, he enlisted in the army with a patriotic heart, despite his own father's disapproval. He believed in serving something greater than himself. In his first tour of deployment he was the only one in his unit to return home.

In his second tour, this time in an intelligence unit, the fundamental belief for why he joined the military in the first place was destroyed. He learned the war he was fighting wasn't about standing up for freedom for people—it was about power. When he reported information about a planned invasion that could be stopped and would prevent the deaths of many innocent people, he was told he had "no information." They wanted it to happen.

That betrayal shattered his faith in government systems, but it couldn't break his faith in God.

I want to be clear: I have deep respect and gratitude for our veterans and those currently serving in the military, as did my dad. His experience was with failed leadership, not with the courage and sacrifice of our service members.

After his time in the military he went to seminary school and became a preacher with the Church of Christ, pouring his life into ministry. But once again, the more he saw behind the scenes, the more he realized that a lot, not all, of organized religion was often about power and control rather than living God's word. He used to say that many of the men in organized religion were ruining the very message they claimed to protect.

Despite these disillusionments, my dad never stopped believing in the transformative power of God's love. While he left his affiliation with the organized religion that was the Church of Christ, he remained unwavering in his faith in God and the power of divine love.

At one point, he felt he received a message from the Holy Spirit to study what it truly meant to be a spiritual person according to God's design. He spent years diving deep into Greek texts, meeting with scholars, carefully examining every word to understand what it really meant to live as a person of God.

His conclusion was simple: our only job as a human being that leads to the path of spiritual maturity and true salvation is to become love itself.

He was guided by these fifteen attributes that define love in action.

Love is patient.

Love is kind.

Love is not jealous.

Love does not boast.

Love is not arrogant.

Love is not rude.

Love is not self-seeking.

Love is not easily angered.

Love keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in wrong, but rejoices in the right.

Love always protects.

Love always trusts.

Love always hopes.

Love always perseveres.

Love NEVER ends.

He believed that if you take the list of the above attributes and substitute your name for the word ‘love’, you can see the task before us. To conform our lives so much to those attributes until we can read that list and they are all true of us.

This is what it takes if we want to become what God intended us to be. My dad envisioned us as missionaries of service, called to be love in action.

My dad's journey taught me something important: when the systems we trust fail us, we still have a choice. We can become cynical and withdraw, or we can decide that our response to brokenness is what defines us.

He could have let his disillusionment with institutions make him bitter. Instead, he chose to become the very thing those institutions had failed to be—a living example of love in action. Not love as a grand gesture or public declaration, but love as a daily practice in ordinary moments.

This is the choice we all face today. In a world that feels increasingly divided, indifferent, and lonely—where people feel they don't matter and face crushing pressure to achieve externally—we've forgotten the most important work: the cultivation of character.

You can achieve external success (build a business, accumulate wealth, gain recognition) while remaining fundamentally self-centered and contributing nothing meaningful to humanity. But who you become gives meaning to what you achieve.

The beautiful truth my dad discovered is that individual acts of love aren't small at all. They're the only thing powerful enough to bridge the gap between broken and healed.

When you choose patience with your child having a meltdown in the grocery store, you're not just helping your family, you're modeling a different way of being for everyone watching. When you respond with kindness to someone who's rude to you, you're interrupting a cycle that could have continued for generations. When you choose to truly see the person without a home, to look them in the eye and offer a smile, you're confirming their dignity and worth.

My goal is to carry forward my dad's legacy by doing the work myself—striving to become love in action through these attributes, while building a community of others who want to do the same. Others who want to take ownership of their lives and decide who they want to be in the world.

I write from my own journey of doing my best to live these attributes. I share the failures as much as the insights, because transformation happens in the honest acknowledgment of where we fall short and the decision to keep growing anyway.

Because here's what I believe: If more people become love, and, if these become the people raising our children, serving our communities, leading our organizations, and showing up in our everyday interactions, how can the world not change?

This isn't about perfection, it's about direction. The work isn't glamorous. It doesn't make headlines. It happens in traffic when someone cuts you off. It happens at home when you're tired and your family needs you anyway. It happens at work when you could take credit but choose to share it instead.

My dad never got to see the full impact of his work, but I see it every day in how I try to show up. That's how love multiplies. It’s not through grand gestures, but through ordinary people deciding that how they treat the person in front of them actually matters.

The invitation is simple: take those fifteen attributes and try them on for size. Pick one—maybe patience or kindness—and see what happens when you intentionally choose it for a day. Notice the moments when you want to keep a record of wrongs, and choose not to. See what it feels like to protect someone's dignity instead of being right.

Do what you can, where you are, with what's in front of you. Fill the need that's right there - the person who needs to be heard, the situation that needs kindness, the moment that calls for grace.

We can't sit back and wait for others to fix what's broken. We need to take responsibility for our own lives and our own part in this transformation.

Every day you have a choice. Every interaction is an opportunity. Every small act of love creates ripples you may never see but that matter more than you know.

Decide Your Life.