What’s Your Brand?

“Branding is not about color scheme, your logo or the design of your book cover. Branding is what you’re known for.”

My friend, Loren Norris, speaking at the Roaring Lambs Writers Conference yesterday, delivered a powerful statement.

I thought When you look at branding in that way, what is my brand? What is the first thing people think when my name comes up?

Scary to consider.

I don’t know about you, but at one time my goal was to be popular. After growing up as the poor girl in a very affluent environment, college was a freeing experience for me. No one knew how much money I didn’t have. In addition the leader in me had been suppressed in high school, due to my own insecurities about social status, and now there was an opening to break out.

But I was also an egghead in high school, and eggheads weren’t popular.  My early career goal was to be an attorney, so I’d carry around thick law books from the library that I never read. Very nerdy.

So in college I branded myself as an airhead, and party girl, not interested in studies. The brand work, and I lived up to my reputation. As a result, my good grades plummeted, and I never recovered from a less than stellar freshman year G.P.A.

In an effort to be popular, I am sure I was more distant with some, than others. They impeded my trek to the top rung of the social ladder (which I never reached). And today I want to apologize to anyone who I might have offended, or hurt because I didn’t think you were in the “in” crowd.

God never likes that kind of branding.

From the beginning he instructed his people, “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong” (Exodus 23:2).

Later the apostle John warned, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them” (1John 2:15). The Greek word for love used here is “agapao.” It is the sacrificial, deep, selfless love that comes from God. John is saying don’t love the world: people, habits or material things, more than you love God.

By loving God most, he will transform the way you treat his people.

Ever since I rededicated my life to Christ, God has not allowed me to be in a clique. I think he despises them, because I feel a strong push back when I attempt to stick my little toe in one. Instead he wants me to reach the “least of these,” those who need to know his saving power, and those who have lost hope. I have a heart for the person who sits alone in the corner, who isn’t at the head table, or who is just having trouble doing life. I am more uncomfortable with those I deem “popular.”

I guess that’s my brand.

This week I go back to the “scene of the crime,” my old school, Texas Lutheran, where for six years now, I’ve tried to undo the sticky brand that described me in those collegiate years.

Every year, we put on a spiritual retreat for women we attended college with. The first year we called it “The Way We Were, the Way We Can Be.” This year’s theme is “Everybody’s got a story.”

I want to believe my story has changed. I am no longer the girl I was in college. The way I was wasn’t so attractive, but in Christ I am a new creation.

So what about you?

What is your brand?

Has it changed since you were a youth, or are you still striving for popularity? If people described you, what would they say?