Fullness for an Empty Three

The past several months, Philosopher and I have been studying the Enneagram, which is a personality tool. We like it better than other systems for defining personality because it measures motivations and darkness, which everyone possesses. It shows where you move when you are healthy, and when you're stressed. It's been a great for giving us language to talk about how we see different situations (and helped us avoid many a verbal skirmish). Overall, I think the Enneagram's strength is found in its ability to reflect the movements of a person's heart and mind.  You can read more about it here.

Although I am a loving, helpful type 2 at heart, I'm also full of ambition and dreams like a 3, which is my "wing type." Reading and researching the 3 has helped uncover and explain a lot of tendencies which before this year, remained a mystery and source of frustration for me. Here is a quote from the book most recently published on the enneagram called, The Road Back to You:

 "Threes walk into a room and ask, 'What persona do I need to craft and put on to win these people's approval? Who do they want me to become before they'll love and admire me?'...Because Threes grow up believing the world only values people for what they do rather than for who they are, becoming king or queen of the hill is a matter of life or death." 

Throughout my entire life, my parents and closest friends would complain that I would shape shift and become an almost completely different person depending on who I was around. For the first several years of my marriage, I remember being so emotionally unstable that I couldn't even express an opinion about where I wanted to eat.  Much to his frustration, whether it was where to eat or something a politician said, Philosopher knew no matter what he chose, I would not only comply but happily say, "That's what I was thinking!" To continue to frustrate him, when a friend in our company would express an opinion the complete opposite of mine, Philosopher would watch me eagerly smile and nod my head as if to agree. But did I agree? No. I was just doing what I thought I needed to do to build trust.

All this didn't exempt me from actually having opinions...but "searching" for them wasn't as easy as you might think. I had complete anxiety trying to "find myself". Ian Cron puts it well:

"Once in a blue moon, when Threes slow down to reflect on their lives, they might feel like a fraud. 'I wear a thousand masks, but which one is the authentic me?' When this flash of insight comes to them it surfaces a Three's worse fear: 'What if there's no one behind the image? What if I'm no more than an empty suit?'"

And the truth is, I am just an empty suit. The only pattern of successfully filling it has been my pursuit of Jesus. My healthiest times emotionally are also connected to the times when I was/am spiritually healthy.

So, all of this explaining about the enneagram three to bring share this verse:

"...that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height - to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with the fullness of God." Ephesians 3:17-19

It IS possible to be a Three and not be an empty suit. I can ask God to fill this suit, and He happily and graciously will.