I wrote last week to dismantle the oft-repeated affirmation that you can be whatever you want to be. That is something the world likes to tell young people, and it sounds inspirational.

My courageous premise

But as I argued there, form follows function with people as well as buildings. You may want to play in the NBA, but at 5’7”, it’s not going to happen. It doesn’t matter how bad you want it or how hard you practice.

My premise was more courageous than insightful. There is nothing particularly insightful about saying that someone with a low IQ is not going to be able to become a doctor or lawyer. Yet, today it seems almost like fresh, outside-the-box, thinking. And frankly, many probably felt offended by what I wrote.

That is because we have been subjected to a secular brainwashing. It’s like The Manchurian Candidate—the one with Sinatra or the one with Denzel, it doesn’t matter. There is something more sinister at work here beneath the surface.

What is really going on

The idea you can be whatever you want, as silly as that may seem when discussed rationally, persists, but not because we don’t believe that form follows function—we do.  It persists because our secular culture wants to resist the idea that we have been given an assignment by a sovereign God.

Also, if form becomes malleable, as it has to a certain extent, through modern drugs and medical procedures, then we are no longer bound by the function assigned to us by God. Then we are free of God. The mantra that we can be whatever we want, then, is an oblique assault on our createdness. 

The mantra, while not true individually, becomes aspirational for a culture seeking freedom from God. It’s not merely a pithy encouragement for the young; it’s a swipe at the God who created us.

Freeing themselves from the call of God

Modern expressive individualism increasingly treats our created form as restrictive and limiting. Medical procedures and drugs now allow people to modify their form, creating the illusion that form itself is malleable. And if form itself is not fixed, function is no longer fixed. 

A malleable form becomes hope for those who seek to reject the function assigned to them by a sovereign God. They are free to create themselves and their own calling.

Conversely, telling people that they can’t be whatever they want is reaffirmation of their createdness and the concept of calling.

So, next time you hear — “you can be whatever you want to be”—recognize it for what it is, because it is saying far more than it appears.  

It’s not merely motivational. It’s theological. GS