I was looking at the topics in one of my watched forums and saw this one again, and thought about it in a completely new way than I originally posted. Sometimes our "identity" is all wrapped up in our careers. Before I left Los Angeles, I always had jobs in the entertainment business where all the clients were famous. That was my identity. I had a girlfriend there in the same rut. She was never a "secretary," she would correct you and say, no, I'm an Executive Administrative Assistant. And even though she is a Christian, when I talk to her now, it is all about her business.
Others are all about being a mother, and when their children grow up and she becomes an "empty nester" she is lost. Many child stars who aren't as "cute" as when they were kids, turn to drugs, and even suicide.
I believe this is where dying to self is so important. Christ said He would never leave us or forsake us. Is our identity still trapped on the earth, or already in heaven with Christ?
At 55, after my husband, who I wasn't suppose to marry if I had just picked up the warnings that the Spirit was giving me all throughout the relationship, left me for the wife of his best friend and married her, making her wife number five; I left Arizona where we lived and moved back to Tennessee where my first sister-in-law lived. (My husband had been an actor and a Nashville recording artist, and a cheater and pathological liar.) But now I needed a job, but even with all my experience, I couldn't find a job in an office to save my life. Even legal secretaries were not even a $1 over minimum wage! I went to a temp agency and started working that day in a factory. It became fun. My high nose identity was dropping off and I was a tomboy again, driving every kind of forklift and cherry picker there was. God was working in me. My identity was not a Theatrical Project Administrator in a studio, or now a factory worker; it was as the wife of God. I was in total submission to Him, and He and His Word were all I thought about, and it still is.