Identity Crisis: The Ultimate Quest to Find Who We Are in Christ

By Dwayne Ledbetter

Find vision and purpose for your life

What really happens to you when you come to Jesus?

What does your past mean to your present?

What does the Bible say about how to maintain a proper relationship with God?

How do you build a business on the principles of the kingdom of God?

Find a new identity through thankfulness and praise.

Learn to draw from the cross of Jesus for every need.

Learn what it means to abide in God's love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098057565

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Beginnings

The earliest remembrance of the presence of God in my life was when I was six years old. I was standing by my dad and mom in a small Baptist church. My sister, along with some neighbor girls, was coming to the Lord Jesus that day. I remember saying to myself, Someday I’m going to do that.

My dad, mom, sister, and I lived on a 640-acre farm, a mile south of Bushland, Texas. Bushland was fourteen miles west of Amarillo, Texas, in the Texas Panhandle. I loved that farm. We moved there from a small cottage north of Amarillo where my sister and I were born at home. I was born just before World War II. We moved to the farm when I was about three years old, and my sister was six. This was the middle of World War II.

My dad worked at Pantex Ordnance Plant. He was the maintenance superintendent there. The plant made bombs and artillery shells for the war effort. This plant was rated as the most efficient plant in the US, and Dad was responsible for this rating. My mom had to do much of the farmwork because of Dad’s responsibilities at the ordnance plant.

My parents were products of the Great Depression. My dad was raised on a farm just east of Silverton, Texas. Their family had just got the crops in that fall and put a year’s supply of cash in the bank. Then the bank was shut down by the US government, and they lost a year’s supply of income. My dad and his brothers were just out of high school and had to go to work on road projects sponsored by the government to make ends meet for the family. They began to raise a very large garden of vegetables. They also raised farm animals so they could eat. This was the way our farm was run. We were pretty much self-sustaining in what we produced on that farm! As kids, my sister and I were taught and expected to work and produce. Everyone was taught to pull their own weight and not complain! As a kid, if I complained about what was on my plate on the table, I was told to leave the table without eating! We did have good food, and we knew where it came from.

I was five years old, and I spent a lot of time in that very large garden with rows of vegetables one half mile long. My dad paid me $0.10 for a two-gallon bucket of black-eyed peas, etc. We had that very large garden and lots of farm animals for meat. We had fifty Holstein calves at once; we kept some for milk cows and raised some for meat. It was exciting breaking those calves to ride. For my sister and I, the calves provided a lot of excitement until we could ride them all. Some bull calves were pretty stubborn. Since we had no horses, after a while we began to ride cows to round up cows! Our cousins in Silverton, Texas, had horses, but all we had were those bony-backed cows!

We also had chickens. In the spring, my mother would buy about a hundred chicks and feed them to fryer size and then butcher them. Mom would wring their heads off then put them on the ground and let them run to bleed out. It was my job to go catch this chicken without a head and bring it back to be cleaned. The only good part about this process was that I liked fried chicken! Oh yes, we had pigs. My dad would feed the pigs milo, which he raised, and milk from the cows. This made for the best pork chops and ham in the country. I remember coming home from school to see Dad rendering lard. I would fish out the cracklings from the rendering process and eat until my heart was content. I know that lard isn’t necessarily good for you health wise. One thing you cannot argue with is the taste of lard for frying and making piecrust, doughnuts, fried fruit pies, fried chicken, and fried catfish. Oh well, that’s enough of that!

My parents were very much a part of the Great Depression and World War II and part of the Greatest Generation that the United States has ever known. Performance was a word that stood out in their lives. It took performance to just exist in the Great Depression then performance to win World War II. Performance was important in the workplace and in sports. My dad said that all we would have had to do to be a welfare case would be to just slow down!

There I was living in this fifty-year-old story-and-a-half farmhouse. We also had a huge wooden barn with two stories, an old garage building that leaned about thirty degrees, and an out-house for a toilet. Nothing had been painted for at least fifty years. They were just gray wood structures. Now that I think about it, no one could afford the paint!

You remember I was three years old when my parents moved to the farm from the cottage north of Amarillo. These first years formed my first impressions of life. I can remember the whole family went swimming in this huge stock tank on the farm on a hot summer’s day. I might have been four or five years old by then. The thing that I remember most was that I was supposed to be able to swim across that tank! My sister who was three years older than I was could do this. The implied question from our parents to me was, If your sister can swim across the tank, why can’t you? I must confess, I was puzzled about their attitude toward me. So in my effort to please my parents, I swam across the tank underwater! As far as I can remember, this was the first time I ever tried to swim! This incident and my parents wanting (almost demanding) that I perform well would later be my first indicator into their past experiences. You see this was the point at which I began to wonder if they would like me if I could not perform according to their expectations. It was later in life when I learned about my parents’ past that I began to know the truth about what motivated their attitudes toward me. You must understand at this point that both of my parents were Christians from their youth. I love them dearly, and they have always wanted the best for me. Nevertheless, we find that the truth is still the truth, and the truth is what sets a person free!

Even so, there were lots of good things going on at this time! But in order to put things into perspective, sometimes we have to take the mask off and show everything in the proper balance. This is so that at the end of the day, we can understand the kingdom of God, and that our true identity is in Jesus our Savior. You see, God wants us to go from performing to being cherished!

There was a one-room school a mile north of our farm at the little farm community of Bushland, Texas. Besides the school, there was a general store, a grain elevator, and some houses. The school was run by a married couple whose names were Mr. and Mrs. Israel. We all loved this couple. Mrs. Israel was one of the best teachers I ever had. She was my first-grade teacher, my second-grade teacher, and she taught me for part of my third grade. Mr. Israel taught the upper grades. The school had a removable divider in the middle to accommodate the upper and lower grades.

As I look back on starting school, the thing that I remember most was this: I was only four years old when I started the first grade! My parents wanted me to get a head start so that I could get out of high school quicker, so then I could get out of college quicker, etc. I was so immature that first year that the older boys terrorized me on the playground. I remember thinking, I wish I had someone to defend me. Help! But I grew fast and made the same kids who terrorized me think twice! It seems like this is the story of my life growing up. I was always competing with guys two or three years older than me. This early start showed up over and over as I went through school in the form of a struggle. The expectation level was set at a high mark. Not understanding all this as a small boy translated into: I wonder if I don’t perform well, will they like me?

Oh well, life marched on. I was somewhat of a fun lover. I loved the farm animals. My sister and I had a pet pig. My dad bought this registered Hampshire boar piglet to raise for breeding purposes. My sister and I had other ideas. We made a pet out of him and named him Porky! Porky followed us everywhere while we did the chores. One especially muddy day, Porky followed us around while we were doing chores, after which he wanted to come into the house with us. I can still hear my mother proclaiming, That pig is not coming in this house!

Oh yes, I liked to play with spiders and tarantulas. A ball of gum on the end of a string placed in a spider hole in the ground would yield a spider. We had huge tarantulas in that part of Texas. The tarantulas were big spiders about the size of a softball! When a tarantula was crossing the school playground, boys and girls would surround it, watching it. I would part the boys and girls, jump in, and smash the big spider! Spider juice would get on the girls’ legs, and that brought a smile for me as these girls would squeal!

Our family loved to go fishing at Forrester’s Creek south of the farm. Buffalo Lake was the other fishing hotspot in those days. Our family and neighbors from Amarillo and Silverton, Texas, would gather at Buffalo Lake. An old rowboat and several trot lines would yield a mess of channel catfish. My parents and neighbors would place one-third of a fifty-five gallon barrel on the campfire. They would fill the barrel with lard.