I entered this world on November 9th, 1990, at 5:54 in the morning, in Arnot-Ogden Memorial Hospital in Elmira, New York. Before I ever understood the world into which I was born, before I knew my own name, and before I knew anything of the God who had formed me, He already knew me. Every one of my days had been ordained before one of them came to be.

He knew the heart I would possess, the rebellion I would willingly embrace, the idols I would pursue, and the destruction my sin would bring upon myself and others. Yet He also knew the mercy He would one day display. The same God who knew the depths of my rebellion before I ever committed them had already determined to show the riches of His grace through the salvation of an undeserving sinner.

Long before I understood my need for redemption, the sovereign hand of God was already ordering the circumstances of my life. Before I ever understood the weight of my sin, I carried a name. I was named after my father: Tony James Glover Jr. There is something significant about receiving the name of the one who came before you. A name carries more than letters and sounds; it carries a sense of belonging, lineage, and identity. For a son, bearing his father’s name often awakens a desire to honor that name by becoming like the man who bore it first. I did not understand those things as a child, but I felt their weight nonetheless. Before I ever knew the God who created me, I was already learning what it meant to find identity in someone else.

My parents had originally planned to name me Tyler, after Steven Tyler, the front man of Aerosmith, a band they enjoyed at the time. Yet when I arrived, they looked at the child in their arms and saw such a resemblance to my father in his younger years that they set the original plan aside. I received his name instead.

Looking back, even that small decision reminds me of the providence of God. Before any of us understood the significance, the Lord was already weaving together the themes that would shape my life. From the beginning, I carried the name of another man. I would spend many years trying to live up to that name, to become worthy of it, and to find my identity in the person who gave it to me.

Only much later would I learn that no earthly name, however precious, can bear the weight of a soul’s true identity. The deepest longing of the human heart cannot be satisfied by becoming like another person, but only by being restored to the image of the One who created us.

As a young boy, I could not have articulated any of this, but I felt it nonetheless. I wanted to be like my father. I admired his strength, his confidence, and his ability to provide. The things he valued became things I valued. The path he walked became the path I naturally desired to follow.

My father had entered the tile trade at a young age after being taken out of school by his own father. He never left that work behind. It became the steady rhythm of our family’s life: hard, practical, and dependent upon finding the next job. Years later, I would find myself walking a remarkably similar road, spending much of my adult life in the same trade.

Looking back, I can see that my desire to resemble him was not merely about occupation or outward appearance. It reached into something deeper. It was the longing of a son to find his place by becoming like the man whose name he carried and whose life he admired.

In reflection, I can see that none of this happened apart from the providence of God. Long before I recognized His hand, He was sovereignly ordering every circumstance, relationship, influence, and experience that would shape my life. Nothing was accidental. Nothing escaped His notice.

Yet beneath my admiration for my father was a deeper longing, one that belongs to every human heart. I wanted to belong. I wanted to be known. I wanted to find my place by becoming like someone greater than myself.

The tragedy of sin is not that we stop longing for identity. It is that we seek it in the wrong places. God created mankind in His own image. We were made to know Him, belong to Him, and find our identity in Him alone. The first man was formed from the dust and given life by the breath of God. He was placed in the garden not merely to work, but to walk with the One who made him. Identity was never meant to be something we create for ourselves. It was always meant to be received from the God whose image we bear.

But when sin entered the world, it did not merely bring guilt; it corrupted the very desires of the human heart. Instead of finding our identity in God, we began searching for it everywhere else; in approval, achievement, possessions, reputation, success, and even in those we admire most. I was no exception.

Like many sons, I first looked to my earthly father. Yet my father was himself a fallen man in need of the same grace that I would one day desperately need. I loved him. I admired his strength, his confidence, and his ability to provide. As a child, I did not have the ability to analyze the worldview that shaped him. I simply saw the man I wanted to become like.

My father professed atheism. The worldview he embraced left no rightful place for God, and because I looked to him for an understanding of life, his assumptions quietly became my own. His strength seemed sufficient. His confidence seemed enviable. His ability to provide through the labor of his hands seemed like the measure of what it meant to be a man. In admiring him, I was already learning to measure life by standards that did not begin with God and did not end with God.

Later, he would openly ridicule the faith, joking about how gullible people must be to believe the miracles recorded in Scripture. Those words did not create my unbelief; they fell upon soil already prepared by my own sinful heart.

To be clear, I do not recount these things to cast blame upon my father for the life I chose to live. Scripture leaves no room for such excuses. The seeds of rebellion were already present within my own heart. My father’s beliefs influenced me, but they did not force me. I embraced them willingly because they agreed with what my sinful nature already desired. I did not reject God merely because my father rejected Him. I rejected God because I loved ruling my own life.

Even in my earliest years, that love of self-rule began to reveal itself in small but telling ways. I was the third child in the home, yet my father’s firstborn. Before me were two older half-brothers from my mother’s previous relationships, and two years later my only full brother, Nicholas, was born. From the beginning, I had a way of drawing Nick into whatever I was doing, whether it was harmless or foolish. One of the first stories my mother still tells is the day I found her bottle of fluoride, drank from it, and then tried to convince my little brother to do the same. I became sick, poison control was called, and somewhere inside a Byrne Dairy store I eventually vomited. The incident was nothing more than childish foolishness, yet even there the pattern of my heart was already beginning to show itself. I wanted my own way, and I wanted others to join me in whatever desire I was pursuing.

That same desire to have my own way appeared again in quieter acts of theft. Walking home from the store with my mother one afternoon, I slipped a bag of yogurt-covered pretzels into the waistband of my pants and covered it with my shirt. The crinkle of the bag gave me away. My mother was disappointed, and we had a conversation about what I had done and about returning what I had taken. Whether I ever did, I honestly cannot remember.

Later, while living in a trailer park, I noticed a large package sitting on a neighbor’s porch. Curiosity quickly turned into temptation. I opened it, found boxes of cereal and treats inside, and carried them home. We ate them. No one ever returned them. These were not the darker sins that would come later, but they revealed the same inward bend of the heart. Even in small things, I was learning to place my desires above what was right, above what belonged to others, and above the authority God had established.

That is the true condition of every fallen heart. This is one of the painful realities of life east of Eden: sin does not remain isolated within one person or one generation. It spreads through families, through relationships, and through the examples we absorb from those closest to us. Those whom we love most deeply often pass on both blessings and brokenness. We inherit valuable skills, admirable qualities, perseverance, and sacrifice, while also encountering wounds and patterns that stand opposed to the truth of God.

My father himself had grown up under a hard hand. His own father was an angry man, often drunk, who beat his wife and once pinned my father against a wall with a gun pressed into his ribs. The brokenness my father experienced shaped him deeply, and some of that brokenness would later become visible in his own life. Yet even there, the Lord was not absent.

Brokenness may be passed down from one generation to another, but it does not outrun the sovereignty of God. The very relationships that were meant to point us toward our true Father can, through human sinfulness, become the means by which we learn to live as though He does not exist.

Yet even here the Lord was not absent. The God whom my father denied was the very God who gave him life and sustained every breath he drew. The God whom I neither knew nor desired was already ordering every step of my life according to His eternal purpose. My rebellion did not overturn His decree. My unbelief did not diminish His sovereignty. The worldview I inherited did not threaten Him, nor did the blindness I willingly embraced surprise Him. Though I could not see His hand, His hand never ceased guiding me.

For years I bore my father’s name. I followed in many of his footsteps and adopted many of his assumptions about life, truth, and God. I looked to him to define what it meant to be a man. In doing so, I was doing what every human heart does when it turns from its Creator: seeking identity in the creature rather than the One who made him.

The longing itself was not wrong. The object of the longing was. God had placed within me a desire to belong, to be known, and to find my place in a story greater than myself. That desire was meant to lead me to Him. Instead, I first sought it in my earthly father, and later I would seek it in pleasure, approval, relationships, and the false identities I built for myself.

The Scriptures teach that we are made in the image of God. This truth is not merely a poetic description of humanity; it is the foundation of our dignity and the explanation for the restlessness that exists within every human heart. Because we bear His image, we were created with a longing for significance, belonging, and purpose. We were made to know Him, to reflect Him, and to find our identity in Him. Yet when that image is ignored or rejected, those longings do not disappear. They simply attach themselves to lesser things.

I attached them first to my father. Later, I would attach them to pleasure, reputation, the approval of friends, the intoxication of substances, and the fleeting affirmation of romantic relationships. Each one promised to tell me who I was. Each one failed.

I had spent years trying to become the image of another man. Yet I had been created to bear the image of God. The tragedy of sin is not only that it makes us guilty; it is that it distorts the very purpose for which we were made. We were made for God. Yet sin convinced us that we could find life apart from Him. We traded communion for independence, and called the exchange freedom. He created us that we would find our identity from Him, yet we spend our lives trying to construct one for ourselves.

Yet the same God who knew my rebellion before I was born also knew the day when He would call me out of darkness and into His marvelous light. The name I received at birth was a gift from an earthly father. The name I would one day receive by grace would be far greater. In Christ, the image that sin had terribly marred would begin to be restored, not through my efforts to become like another man, but through the Spirit’s work of conforming me to the image of the Son. That is the identity that cannot be lost, the belonging that cannot be taken, and the name that will endure when every earthly name has faded.

Even now, as I look back on the boy who wanted so badly to be like his father, who reached for what was not his and drew his younger brother into his schemes, I can see the mercy of God already at work. The Lord was teaching me, even through my wandering, that every false identity would eventually leave me empty. He allowed me to admire human strength so that I might one day recognize its limitations. He allowed me to carry an earthly name so that I might one day treasure the name that is above every name.

The longing was His gift. The misdirection was my sin. The eventual redirection would be pure grace. I did not know any of this then. I knew only that I wanted to be like the man whose name I bore. I did not yet understand that my greatest problem was not merely the man I was trying to imitate, the home in which I was raised, or the absence of godly influence around me. My deepest problem was the heart I had been born with; a heart curved inward upon itself, a heart that preferred self-rule over submission to God, a heart that searched for identity everywhere except in the One who had formed me in the womb and numbered my days before one of them came to be.

That heart would lead me far. It would take me into places of darkness I could not yet imagine. But it would never take me beyond the reach of the God who had already written my story. The boy who carried his earthly father’s name would one day receive a far greater name: the name of a son adopted by grace, justified by blood, and kept by the power of the Shepherd who loses none of His own.