perspective

Sometimes you read something and you know right then that you are changed. 
I just read these paragraphs by Chieko Okazaki in her book Being Enough.  My perspective has changed.  I hope forever.  I know it's long, but read it anyway, it's worth it.

"In most Mormon gatherings, if I were to ask you who you are, particularly what your eternal identity is, many would answer, 'I am a child of God.'…But that is not enough.  Every living person is a child of God.  But that's the beginning point, not the ending point.  The ending point is to become peers of God.  He wants us to grow up, not remain children.

"I think that some of us sometimes regress to being two-year-olds of God and have tantrums when things don't go our way or when we get tired or scared.  Some of us get stuck being teenagers of God, who just got a driver's license and are out to see how fast we can move our lives from one lane to the next and play some pretty reckless and heedless games with this precious life God has given us.  Some of us jump ahead and are Alzheimer's patients with God where our short-term memory is disappearing and we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again because we can't remember that the exact same thing we're right now didn't work before either.  Some of us are junkies of God and go from one spiritual book or speaker or Education Week to another without ever thoughtfully sifting and sorting and laying out the pieces of our lives before God and asking him to help us shape these pieces into something meaningful.  Some of us are workaholics of God.  We plunge into our callings and our service projects and our personal gospel study and our genealogical research and God becomes somebody we meet at the drinking fountain or the copy machine long enough to gasp out a quick report before we rush off to the next project.

"Well, I hope that somewhere in your personal definition of who you are that there are descriptions such as 'lover of God' and 'disciple of Christ' and 'handmaiden of the Lord' and 'servant of the Most High' and even the term that Christ himself used: 'friend' of God."

I read the sentence about the "junkie of God" and felt a little sick in my stomach (in a good way).  My focus needs shifting.  It's about the relationship.  Knowledge and actions benefit me as they help me come closer to, not just know about, my Heavenly Father and Savior.  

Who are you?