You Weren’t Wired by Accident: Why Being Known by God Changes How You See Others
About twenty years ago, at a church women’s retreat, my sweet pastor’s wife handed me a personality profile called The Personalities. We completed the profile as a group as part of our opening session, and it had me completely undone. In the best kind of way. I love a good personality test, always have. Behavioral psychology has fascinated me since I took my first college-level Psychology course. And, although I didn’t know it yet, that moment would change how I understood not just my marriage and my friendships, but myself. I felt understood and seen. Something we need at our core.
Up until that point, I’d never really tried to understand why I am the way I am. I never asked why some things come naturally to me and others take real effort, or why I show up in the world the way I do. I just assumed everyone experienced life the same way I did, and when they didn’t, I figured something was off. Sometimes with them, but most often with me.
After that weekend women’s retreat I read two books, Personality Plus and Wired That Way, for a deep dive into The Personalities and I’m not kidding when I say the impact on my life and leadership was huge.
For one, I thought about my calling differently. I stopped talking myself out of what God was asking me to do. He knows me. He chose me. He positioned me. And so I stopped trying to prove or earn my place in His Kingdom. I finally understood this: the God who knows me intimately is the only one who gets to define me.
What Your Personality Says About How You’re Made
So where does this wiring come from? The idea that we’re each wired with a distinct temperament isn’t new, and it isn’t just self-help language. Long before modern psychology, the Greek physician Hippocrates noticed what every parent of more than one child already knows: people are different from birth. He traced those differences to fluids in the body. He had the mechanism wrong, but the observation held. Today we understand far more about temperament and genetics, and the underlying truth stands. You came prepackaged with real, identifiable, God-given wiring. It’s biology, and it’s on purpose.
Known Before You Understood Yourself
We can’t talk about being wired on purpose without coming around to one of my favorite passages of Scripture, Psalm 139. The passage doesn’t start with the verse we’re all most familiar with: “you are fearfully and wonderfully made.” It establishes something foundational. It says, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.” (Psalm 139:1-2)
Did you catch that? We are known by God. The Hebrew word for known here, yada, is relational. It’s the kind of knowing that comes from closeness. Not information. Intimacy.
Before I took my first breath, God knew me. Every strength. Every weakness. Every quirk. He knew. The same is true for you, too, friend.
There’s great comfort in that truth because it takes the pressure off of us to prove anything to Him. We’re fully known and deeply loved by the God who created us. And He won’t ever misunderstand us.
That’s an incredible gift.
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
The passage goes on to say,
“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” (Psalm 139:14)
For years, when I read that verse, I didn’t quite take it to heart. But here’s what I want you to see: God did a wonderful work when He designed you. That’s a fact. All the things I appreciate about myself and even the things I don’t really love. They’re all covered by the truth that this verse declares.
My natural pace, my need for quiet, the way I process things internally before I say them out loud aren’t necessarily things I need to apologize for. These things represent God’s handiwork. And here, in Psalm 139, the psalmist is praising God for it.
Growth is still the invitation. But we start from being fully known and loved. Not feeling like a disappointment or failure. And knowing yourself isn’t the same as excusing yourself. A few verses later, the psalmist shows us what it means to let God at your heart and mind. He says, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23-24)
It’s a hard prayer to pray. But it’s a beautiful example of self-awareness. I’ve said it before, self-awareness isn’t the same as self-centeredness or self-absorption. When done well in a way that honors God and invites the Holy Spirit into the conversation, it’s a good and holy thing. Because here’s the thing: You can’t grow past a weakness you’ve never been honest about. Self-awareness allows us to make space for God to transform us from the inside out, so we look more and more like Jesus. And isn’t that the point?
Why This Matters for the People You Love and Lead
Self-awareness was never meant to stop with us. Do you know why this matters? Romans 12:18 says it plainly. “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”
It’s much, much easier to do that when you’re living from a place of being fully known and fully loved.
When you feel truly known by God and in turn begin to understand and see yourself as He sees you, something shifts in how you show up for other people. You stop assuming everyone experiences the world the way you do. You start noticing that the person across the table from you was fearfully and wonderfully made too, wired intentionally and specifically by God, and that their differences aren’t a problem to manage. They’re on purpose, same as yours.
Think about the person who’s always running late. The one who never stops talking. The one who goes quiet the moment things get hard. We might get frustrated and think they’re just being difficult. We may even think of it as a flaw. Sometimes, it’s just wiring.
It’s true for me. It’s true for you. And it’s true for the people you love and lead.
Recently, I was able to sit down with Marita Littauer and chat about exactly this! She’s been teaching people for more than fifty years how to understand themselves and the people around them.
Here’s the thing, friend. Nothing God does is careless. You are created on purpose and for a purpose. We all are.
So, here’s my question for you: Who in your life have you been treating like a problem to solve? What if you could ease the tension by working to understand them?
One More Thing
Episode 09 of The Purpose Project Podcast, The Gift of Understanding: A Conversation with Marita Littauer, goes deeper into what it looks like to understand your own wiring and also the wiring of the people you love. Listen here or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.
Grab Personality Plus here, or Marita’s book, Wired That Way, here or take The Personalities Profile at thepersonalities.com.
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