Posted September 09, 2026
If you were a lobster, you would want to be blue like the one being released from a New Hampshire museum back into the ocean this week. You would be rare: researchers estimate that blue lobsters are about one in two million. Even better, you would be fitted with a tag so that if you are caught in a lobster trap again, the fisher can call the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and you can be set free.
Or, if you were a dime, you would want to be an 1894-S Barber dime, of which only nine are known to exist today. On September 1, one example sold for $1,250,000 at auction, more than 260 times the amount a teenage collector paid for it nearly seventy years ago.
As it is, you are you—which makes you even more unique. You’re one of more than eight billion people living on our planet. What’s more, you’re one of the 117 billion people estimated to have ever lived. The longer our species survives, the more unique you will become.
Not everyone celebrates your uniqueness, of course. That’s because we typically measure value by its value to us. Apple’s product launch later today, for example, is more or less interesting to you depending on whether you (a) use Apple products, (b) are in the market for what they’re selling, and (c) have the money to pay what they cost.
So, here’s the good news: unlike Prince Harry, who has reportedly been told by his father that he cannot work on behalf of the royal family upon his return to the UK, your Father ties your significance to your uniqueness in a way that transcends your cultural status and transforms your identity.
As I have written often in books and articles, the jihadists who staged 9/11 were motivated by the claim that the West has been attacking Islam since the Crusades and especially with our support for Israel. In their view, since American civilians vote for our leaders and pay taxes to support our military, there are no “innocent civilians” among us. We are all complicit in this perceived attack on Islam.
Since the Qur’an requires Muslims to defend Islam (cf. Surah 2:190), the 9/11 attackers believed themselves to be “martyrs” for their faith rather than terrorists. Any fear they could strike in our hearts that could motivate us to end our “war” on Islam would be worth their sacrifice.
Of course, their victims twenty-five years ago this Friday had nothing to do personally with any of this. I doubt that any of them even understood the ideology I have just described, since Americans were largely unaware of it before 9/11. In the minds of the terrorists, however, because they were at war with America, all Americans were their enemies.
My wife and I recently watched Irena’s Vow on Netflix. It tells the compelling true story of a Polish woman who worked as a housekeeper for a Nazi officer and risked her life to hide a group of Jews in his villa. At one point the officer screams at her, “They’re Jews! They’re the enemy!” To which Irena replies, “No, they’re not, Herr Major. They’re not anyone’s enemy.”
What the officer claimed is what all wars require: depersonalizing the other side.
Think how few Japanese and German soldiers had any agency with regard to the ideologies that prompted them to try to kill Americans in World War II. And how few Americans had anything to do with the events and decisions that prompted them to try to kill Japanese and Germans. But once they got into battle, everyone on the other side became their enemy. And people who would never otherwise think to kill someone they didn’t know spent years trying to do just that.
Blurring the uniqueness of each human being is at the heart of war. Recovering our uniqueness and tying it to our sacredness is the key to flourishing as the children of God.
Peter wrote his second epistle to “those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours” (2 Peter 1:1a, my italics). How could Jesus’ lead apostle, the preacher of Pentecost and pastor of the church in Rome, say this of his readers, most of whom were Gentiles tempted by “the passions of your former ignorance” and “futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Peter 1:14, 18)?
His opening sentence continues: “. . . by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:1b). As a result,
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature (vv. 3–4, my italics).
The last phrase could be translated literally “you may join those who engage fully in the very nature and character of God himself.” No other religion or worldview in human history has offered such a transformation. When you trusted in Christ, your Father restored you to pre-Fall oneness with himself. As his child, you take part in the spiritual “genetics” of your Father (John 1:12) and are loved and liked unconditionally and passionately by the God of the universe.
This is who you are. Others view you in the collective as a member of their tribe or not, their enemy or not, valuing or fearing you by what you can do for or to them. Since we tend to evaluate ourselves by what we think others think of us, their perceived opinion becomes our personal identity.
I am no different. Tim Keller spoke to me just as he did to you when he warned, “If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.”
This is why a statement my youth minister made to me in high school has become treasured wisdom: “Always remember the source of your personal worth.”
“Always” includes today.
“My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me.” —Eugene Peterson
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