Who is Brant Copen?

"This is your life, are you who you want to be?"  I distinctly remember driving down 32nd street in Phoenix about six years ago.  I was driving my Jeep Wrangler and all the doors and roof were off.  I was coming home from work on a Friday afternoon and the sun was out in a clear blue sky.  I didn't normally listen to Christian music at that time because I thought it lacked imagination but this particular day I guess 103.9 The Edge must have had too many commercials or something because I switched it over to the Christian station.  An outdated Switchfoot song was playing that I had heard dozens of times but never really listened to.  I don't remember any of the verses but the chorus asked a simple question, "This is your life, are you who you want to be?".  For some reason I actually truly listened to that question as a question and not just as a chorus to a song.  "This is your life, are you who you want to be?" 

This is my life.  I am in control of my life.  I am not a pawn in someone's game, I am not a prisoner in someone's jail cell, I own my life and I make my own decisions.  At the end of my life nobody is going to be held responsible for me except myself.  I have the power to control who I am and who I am becoming.  This isn't someone else's life, this is my life.  I think it took a lot of guidance from others and a long time for me to even come to a realization of that statement.  I'm not just the product of my influences and circumstance or the people around me, this is my life.  I am responsible for who I am.  Then for a while that realization brought dread.  "Responsibility?  What's that?" was another line in a song that had resonated with me in high school.  Who wants responsibility?  I didn't trust myself.  Give me power over my own life and more than likely I'd just screw everything up.  That's what I thought.  So being in control of who I was was an unfair burden, a curse even.  I didn't ask for this power, for this responsibility.  What a cruel sentence!  Giving someone the power of choice without any of the information needed to make the choices!  It felt like it was forced upon me.  But I kept going and as I matured and as I started following Jesus I started realizing that that responsibility wasn't actually a curse, in fact, it was a blessing! 

I am not limited to the stunted imagination of my peers, I am not destined to anything I don't want, I am not doomed to failure.  I have power over my own life!  I have power to determine what I do and who I am.  I know myself best and who I want to be and I have the power to make that happen!  I'm definitely not going to screw it all up; after all, I am the most informed person on the planet when it comes to Brant Copen.  Nobody has more information than I do, if anyone can succeed at determining Brant Copen's destiny then I certainly can!  I started taking advantage of that responsibility.  I started doing things that I wanted to do.  Traveling, making friends, learning new things, strengthening relationships.  What a blessing to be the owner of my own life!  I get to do whatever I want! 

That's where I was at as I drove my Jeep home from work on that Friday afternoon six years ago.  I knew that this was my life, but was I who I wanted to be?  Had I been using the freedom and the power I had over my own destiny to become the person I really wanted to be?  It's funny how a person can miss out on that.  I know people who have lived their whole life knowing that they had authority over their own destiny but not using it to become who they wanted to be.  They wanted to be loved and so they started becoming whatever they thought everyone would approve of, but they turned out becoming someone they never wanted to be.  Or they wanted to be significant and so they worked really hard at achieving things that they associated with significance but in the end they became someone they never wanted to be. 

This song in this moment gave me a reality check.  "Are you who you want to be?"  No.  I thought about it and the answer was definitely no.  What I really really deep down wanted to be was someone who could look back on my life with a clear conscience when it was just me and God in a room and know in my heart that I did the best with what I had.  That I truly genuinely loved the people around me, that I allowed God to use me as He saw fit, that I used my life to improve everyone and everything I came into contact with instead of hurting or destroying, that I was the kind of person that could be trusted, the kind of person that lived a radical lifestyle of self-denial, that walked in boldness and courage.  I wanted to believe in my heart that I was truly within the will of God; not just what other people said was the will of God, but what I believed in my heart was the will of God.  I wanted to contribute to the improvement of the future of the world, to God's Kingdom coming "to earth as it is in Heaven".  I wanted to take advantage of the blessing that life is and truly enjoy what life had to offer and not waste my time waiting for things to happen to me or just waiting around for old age and death to come.  "Are you who you want to be?"  I wanted to be someone who loved God and others sacrificially not because I felt I had to or because I was willing to but because that was my default, what I really enjoyed doing, because deep down that's who I was.  But that's not who I was.  I still had a lot of work to do. 

Now looking back six years ago I guess I thought if I could just muster up the will-power for a good day or two I could change my own identity.  The truth is though, I'm still not really who I want to be now.  There's still a lot of things I wish I could change about who I am over night, but it's not that easy.  Becoming who you want to be takes patience and hard work and self control.  It takes perseverance and humility and resilience.  It takes a lot of prayer.  A lot of prayer.  It takes the willingness to reevaluate yourself and once again sit down and ask yourself, "This is your life, are you who you want to be?"