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I had been an accountant. I majored in accounting in college, passed the CPA exam a few years later. I worked as an accountant for one company for 4 years; then for a second for 22. Although I rose up into financial management, becoming controller, then treasurer and finally financial vice-president, I always had some involvement with accounting, and in my heart I was an accountant.

Most of my friends were accountants. Most days I ate lunch with other accountants. My wife's and my social life involved other accountants and their wives (later women accountants and their husbands--but that wasn't quite the same). We went to accounting dinners and dances. We went on trips sponsored by the accounting association.

I belonged to an accountants' Republican club, played in the accountants' volleyball league, and I was a coin collector, so I joined the accountants' coin collecting club.

For a while as a young accountant I belonged to a political pressure group -- the Accountants Defense League. This group had been formed to combat the prejudice and stereotyping aimed at accountants. We were constantly being pictured as pale, skinny, meek little Uriah Heep types, shoved off somewhere into the back room of an office, pouring over our figures with a green eyeshade to protect us from the single bare bulb glaring down on our paper-strewn desks.

We protested whenever movies or media portrayed us this way. We declared that we were just like everybody else, and we publicized rugged athletes who had studied accounting, or hard hitting business men who had risen up from accounting to leadership in great corporations.

This was our public stance. We were like everybody else. But to be perfectly honest, we weren't fully convinced of this. We knew that we really were more comfortable around each other. Somehow we were different. When no one else was around at a gathering, sometimes we'd all put on our green eyeshades, relax and have a high old time.

But 10 years ago, when entering full-time ministry, I left all that. I gave up that old identity. It wasn't easy -- especially when I felt I had to burn the green eyeshade. I kept some of my old accounting friends, but I resigned from the accounting association, the accountant's coin collecting club and all the rest. It shocked -- even angered -- my accountant friends. They felt I was turning my back on them. Vehemently, they tried to talk me out of what I was doing. "This is unnatural," they declared. "You are denying who you really are. It will never work. You may repress your accountancy for a while, but you'll be miserable -- or you'll be back."

It was difficult. How do you change who you perceive yourself to be? If I wasn't an accountant, who was I? At times I felt like I had no identity. I still felt so different from non-accountants. But gradually the change took place. As I became surrounded by other non-accountants who loved and accepted me as I was, and as God kept reminding me that accounting was what I did, not who I was, I gradually started to change.

That was 10 years ago, and truly, I no longer define myself as an accountant. It was what I did; not who I was. Sure, once in a while I would get the urge to jump in and balance a set of books, and I still believe I could complete a tax return with the best of them. But, that's not who I am.

Who am I? I am a husband, a father, a grandfather, a brother, a friend. I am a born again, Spirit-filled believer in Jesus Christ. I am an Episcopalian, a member of the Body of Christ. I am a son of the King. I am one ofthe redeemed ofthe Lord. I am an American. I am Alan Medinger, and I am a creation of God, and I am unique in all the world. That's who I am. God has shown me that I am much more than I thought I was.