On the interstate between Philadelphia and Wilmington my wife and I a car with an intriguing vanity plate: YBMEUBU (Why be me? You be you.)
It is hard to know what motivated the owner to choose that message. It might have been offered as a bit of therapeutic wisdom. It may have been an inside joke of some kind.
But there is genuine spiritual wisdom in the message. To develop freely and fully we need to be content with being the people we were created to be. If we struggle or long to be someone else, we are never present to our own lives. Worse yet, we cannot hear the Spirit of God move in them. To want to be someone else is to be in between and nowhere — endlessly.
That is, in fact, the focus of the Tenth Commandment. On the surface it looks like not much more than a prohibition: Don’t covet — don’t long for or take something which belongs to someone else.
But the commandment has a positive and life-giving energy: UBU. Start there and God can find you. God can give to you. You can grow.