Character thoughts

[Taken from a letter to my best friend...]
School teaches you to turn on your brain for grades and during class. But, once you go home, then what? Then do whatever you want, but by all means, don’t analyze or interpret your own life. Don't evaluate your own character. No, leave that for the classroom. Analyze and interpret other people’s lives and characters. Dead people, ah, yes, far more interesting, far more beneficial. But when it comes to your own character building… eh… don’t worry about it.
But God is obsessed with our characters. I know that God is obsessed with the heart. So when it comes to the memorizing of historians, mathematical equations, events, grammar rules, sentence structures, biological construction of animals, theatrical shows, etc… that is pushed to the back burner. If we are to call ourselves Christians, if we are to call ourselves seekers of God’s heart, then we sure better begin to see through His eyes and not our own. The heart. If we could describe the heart through mathematical equations, events, grammar rules, etc then there would be no reason for God. We would have it all figured out and the mystery of the way that God has molded and formed each of us would not be a mystery anymore.

We are told in elementary school to “find out who we are” and “learn about ourselves”. We took countless self-analysis surveys. “What’s your favorite color?”, “What’s your favorite food?” Question after question. And no matter how corny the questions were, we were learning about the magnificent creation that our Creator has made.
Well, we’ve advanced beyond the “What’s your favorite food” questions. Those questions have long been exhausted. But the idea has not been emphasized enough. If we are to truly surrender ourselves fully to God, we must desire to be broken open as an offering in every flaw and every beauty that He has placed within us. But how are we to put everything on the altar if we don’t even know who we are?

I am not saying in any way that we will ever know who we are, but God teaches us more and more about ourselves. As we see more of our own characters, we get the opportunity to place it on the altar and say, “Lord, I am so unworthy. You are amazing, in all aspects. You are all knowing. You are Creator. To You be the glory.”

But if we are not desiring to know our own characters, then how can we even begin to grow into the one that the Lord has created us to be?