Who Told You That You Were Less Than?

Reflections on identity, leadership, and the courage to return

There is a question buried in the oldest story ever told. God walks through the garden, and calls out to a man hiding in the shadows: "Where are you?" It wasn't a question about geography. It was a question about identity. About who Adam and Eve had become — or rather, who they had forgotten they were.

That question echoes across millennia. It echoes across continents. And if we are honest, it echoes somewhere inside each one of us.

We Were Made for More Than This

A conversation has been staying with me this week. Ernst Roets sat down with Princess Bhelekazi Mabandla of the Mabandla Royal Family to talk about the crisis in South African communities — the collapse of self-governance, the grip of dependency, and the search for a path forward. The discussion was rooted in our specific, complicated, painful history. But as Princess Mabandla spoke, it became clear that what she was really unpacking was something far older and far wider than any one nation's story.

"Racism isn't a colour issue," she said. "It's a heart issue."

And right there, the conversation stopped being about South Africa and started being about humanity. Princess Mabandla is right. Every fracture we see playing out in our society — the hatred, the tribal posturing, the fear-driven politics, the violence — none of it originates in melanin or geography or culture. It originates in a heart that has lost its anchor. A people unmoored from the truth of who they are.

In my coaching, I point out that bullies or tyrants in the workplace are often fearful and would rather go on the attack, than be the victim. When you eliminate the fear, the anger dissipates. Fear is often the evidence of a false narrative your brain has formed to make sense of a past experience, and/or protect you from a perceived current threat. As many therapists know, “story telling” is also at the root of heightened anxiety. How about listening to a better story?

The World Has a Story It Wants You to Believe

Ernst made a point that deserves its own moment of reflection: the media trades in the negative. Fear sells. Outrage sells. Division sells. Good stories, as the Princess agreed, simply don't.

This is not a new observation, but it is a dangerous reality. When we are spiritually and psychologically adrift — when we have no firm centre of gravity — we become susceptible to whatever narrative is loudest. And the loudest narratives in our world right now are the ones that diminish us. They sort us into categories: oppressor and victim, insider and outsider, worthy and disposable. They tell us our value is conditional. They tell us our identity is tribal.

And many of us, exhausted and searching, begin to believe them.

South Africa knows this particular wound intimately. Decades of a system designed to strip people of dignity, to reduce human beings to a classification, to make some feel they were born to rule and others that they were born to serve. The scars of that are real and they run deep. But the wound itself — the wound of a stolen identity — is not uniquely South African. Look at the polarisation tearing through democracies. Look at the rise of dehumanising rhetoric in political discourse. Look at the loneliness epidemic, the mental health crisis, the quiet desperation of people who have everything the world said would make them happy and still feel profoundly empty.

We are a species in the middle of an identity crisis.

This reminds me of a well-known quote from Les Brown – “You must stand for something, or you will fall for anything.” When you establish a firm foundation on your values – your beliefs in God’s established truth – it’s harder to be swayed by your surrounding culture. The firmer you stand, the more likely you are to look for the truth and ask the hard questions, as I mentioned in this post.

The Answer the Princess Points To

What struck me most about Princess Mabandla was not just the clarity of her diagnosis, but the source of her hope. She didn't reach for policy. She didn't reach for politics. She reached for something deeper.

"We are literally images of God, and He created us out of love."

Imago Dei. It is Latin, but it is not complicated. It means: before you were a race, before you were a nationality, before you were a culture, before you were a success or a failure, a majority or a minority — you were made in the image of God. That is not a religious platitude. It is the most radical, countercultural statement a human being can make right now.

It means your worth is not assigned by the system. It is not measured by your productivity, your politics, or your pain. It is intrinsic. It was woven into you at the moment of your creation by a God who, as the Princess says, made you out of love.

"Destiny knows no colour," she said. And then: "We are created for a purpose. We are more than our cultures."

This is the ground that holds. Everything else shifts — economies, governments, social contracts, cultural narratives. But the truth that we are made in the image of a loving God, and that we each carry a unique and irreplaceable purpose — that does not shift.

The Weight of Leadership

Here is where I want to pause and speak directly to those in positions of influence.

Leaders — whether you lead a nation, a boardroom, a church, a classroom, or a family — the world you create around you flows from the world within you. If your identity is rooted in power, in fear, in the need to protect your position at the expense of others — that is what you will cultivate in the people under your care. Insecurity in a leader produces insecurity in a culture.

The Princess advocates for decentralisation — for self-governance — and at its heart, that is a spiritual argument as much as a political one. It is the argument that human beings, made in the image of God, are not designed to live in dependence and subjugation. We are designed for dignity, for agency, for contribution.

But here is the sobering truth: structures of dependence are not built by accident. They are built by leaders who have forgotten — or perhaps never known — who they truly are. Leaders who govern from wounds govern their people into wounds. Leaders who have traded their God-given identity for an identity rooted in power, ideology, or fear will always, eventually, demand the same trade from those they lead.

What the world needs is not merely better policy. It needs leaders who have done the harder work of returning to God and rediscovering the truth of their own creation.

Leaders who are free. Free from the hunger for validation that corrupts. Free from the fear that divides. Free to see the people in their care as image-bearers, not resources.

"We are different, and we should celebrate our differences and see how they complement each other."

Only a leader who is secure in their own identity can afford to celebrate the identity of others. Insecurity sees difference as threat. Identity sees difference as gift.

The Personal Question

And now, let me turn from the world stage to the quiet place where it matters most: your own heart.

Because if we are honest, the same forces that fracture societies also fracture individuals. The same drift that untethers nations also untethers people. And the question God asked in the garden — "Where are you?" — is still being asked. Of you. Of me.

So let me ask you the hard questions. Not to bring guilt, but to amplify self awareness:

• Where have you allowed the world's narrative to define you more than God's? When did you start measuring your worth by your title, your bank account, your social standing, your productivity — and quietly stop believing that your worth was settled long before any of those things existed?

• Where have you drifted? Is there a version of yourself — anchored, purposeful, free — that feels like a stranger now? What pulled you off course? Fear? Disappointment? The slow erosion of a thousand small compromises?

• Where has self-hatred taken root? The Princess said something very important and profound: "When you self-hate, you self-sabotage, because you have no identity." That is painfully, precisely true. The person who does not know they are loved by God will consistently make choices that confirm their own unworthiness. They will undermine their relationships, their work, their health — not out of malice, but out of a deep, unexamined belief that they do not deserve better.

• What false anchors are you holding? Ideology. Grievance. Success. Approval. Ethnicity. These things are not minimal — but they are also insufficient to hold a human soul. What happens to your sense of self when those things are threatened or taken away?

The Way Back

The way back is not complicated. It is simply hard, because it requires humility — and we live in a world that has dressed pride up as strength.

The way back is the oldest way: return to the God in whose image you were made. Sit with the truth that you were created on purpose, for a purpose, by a God who looked at what He had made and called it very good. Let that be the ground you stand on — not your achievements, not your culture, not your tribe. Not even your wounds.

This is not naive. It does not erase history or dismiss injustice. The Princess does not dismiss the pain of her people — she carries it with her and she speaks into it. But she refuses to let that pain become the final word on who her people are. Because she knows a more ancient and more authoritative word: You are made in the image of God.

And if that is true — and I believe it is — then there is no person beyond dignity. No community beyond healing. No leader beyond redemption. No nation beyond hope.

The question is not whether the truth is available. It always has been.

The question is whether we are willing to come out of hiding and receive it.

"Where are you?"

He is still asking.

 

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Inspired by the conversation between Ernst Roets and Princess Bhelekazi Mabandla on The Principle Podcast, Episode 68: "The Need for Self-Governance in South Africa." Watch it on YouTube.

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