It’s Your Turn

Twenty-seven years. It has been twenty-seven years since I accepted the Truth. Twenty-seven years since Jesus filled me with hope. Twenty-seven years since His life filled me to overflowing. Twenty-seven years since I was moved from lost, rejected and abandoned to purpose-filled and lovingly redeemed.

Yesterday morning, I found myself there again. My thoughts bounced around from the regrets to the rejections to the abandonments. Disguised within the thoughts were the lies:

You are alone. 

You deserve it. 

It is all your fault. 

You will never change.

It’s just who you are.

As I repeated the lies, the pronouns changed and I heard:

I am alone. 

I deserve it. 

It is all my fault. 

I will never change.

It’s just who I am.

Then, three little words in a song that I was listening to brought me back to the truth.

I

AM

LOVED.

That’s right. I am. How easily I forget. I find it so much easier to tell others that God loves them, but it seems unnatural to tell myself. So I don’t, and I forget. 

In John 15:9, Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.” He goes on to say that remaining in His love means keeping His commands, just as He remained in His Father’s love by keeping His commands. When I choose to think about all of the things and people that I can’t change, I am not remaining in His love. When I choose to remember that He loves me, I can’t help but love Him back and I am motivated to love His people. This is how we remain in His love.

I am loved. This isn’t boasting. It isn’t bragging. It isn’t elevating myself. It is simply truth. So I will repeat it. I am loved. 

Now it is your turn.

What Child is This?

I can not remember the entire conversation or the original subject. I remember the moment that the woman sitting across from me said, “Penny was a mistake.” (Name changed for privacy.) She was referring to her adult daughter who was sitting next to her. I remember the look on Penny’s face. She had been punched in the gut by an invisible fist that never withdrew.

This was personal. My heart ached for Penny. Though these words were never said to me about me, I have carried a similar message around with me for most of my life. They weren’t communicated so much by words, but by actions. Maybe you recognize messages like this:

You are a mistake.
I wish you were never born.
You are inconvenient.
You are not worth the time.
You are a hassle.
You are worthless.
You do not matter.
You are stupid.

There are so many other damaging messages that we can receive from a parent, some may be unintentional, that affect how we see ourselves. My messages were, “You are too much trouble, and not worth the time.” Every time my dad did not acknowledge my birthday, I heard those words. Every Christmas he did not call, I heard those words. Every time he said, “I will call you next week,” and months passed without a call, I heard those words. Every time he ignored my phone calls, I heard those words. When I did not see or hear from him for 13 years, I heard those words.

They were lies.

The circumstances surrounding your birth do not determine your value. It does not matter if you were unplanned, unwanted, or unloved by the people around you. It does not matter if adults fought about you or you were sent away. You are not a mistake. You may have been unplanned or unwanted by man, but you were foreseen, planned, and wanted by God. In Psalm 139:13 (NIV), a king named David wrote about God, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” This is also true for you. Regardless of what your parents did, God pieced you together with everything He wanted you to have, so that you would be able to do everything He wants you to do for this world that He placed you in.

Penny is the result of an unplanned pregnancy. I also had an unplanned pregnancy. This is what I told Penny, my son, and what I will tell you. You are a gift. You are a blessing. Your parents may have made a mistake that resulted in pregnancy, but your existence is not a mistake. You are evidence that God can take bad situations and turn them into something good, great, beautiful. You have purpose. You matter. You are loved.

So am I.

A Story Within a Story Within a Story

I was taking one of my long walks, searching for answers. Sometimes I prayed. Sometimes I wrestled. Most of the time I did both, out loud, as I walked to the park and back to work on my lunch break. I was never interrupted and I am suspicious that it was out of fear of the fast-walking, angry woman who took the same route and argued with an invisible person between noon and 1:00pm, Monday through Friday. It was the summer of 2016, arguably the hardest year I have ever experienced. Knowing that it was time, I had left a ministry that brought me joy and purpose for 15 years. The atmosphere at work had taken a bad turn. My dad died. I realized that these things had contributed to much of my identity and I lost them all. I was lost. I began asking God, “Who am I. I know what Your word says, but who am I really?” I knew that I was a child of God, crafted by His own hands, dearly loved, worth dying for. That is what the Bible told me. But at this point, I realized that knowing wasn’t understanding or believing, and just knowing was not enough.

I was listening to 2 Corinthians with my earbuds, still asking God, “Who am I? Who am I to you?” Above the words of the narrator, I heard, “You are a story that I am writing.” Those words echoed in my head for several more verses. I could not recall finding them in the Bible before. I grabbed my phone, went back to the beginning of 2 Corinthians 3 and played it again. They weren’t there. The closest thing I could find was 2 Corinthians 3:3, “You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts.” It was all in my head. But it wasn’t.

I had long believed that my life was a story that God was writing. What I did was the story. I believed it was true of everyone. This was different. This was new. I don’t want to take anything out of context to prove a point. I am only writing what I experienced and what I believe to be true. God revealed that my existence is the story. It wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but somehow, it was enough.

The Bible is the story of God’s pursuit of the people He loves. Each life represented within the pages is a story that He wrote. We are continuations of that same story. The situations that we encounter within our lifetimes are stories. Stories within stories within THE story. And that year that shook my identity, shattered my heart, and nearly took my mind was a piece of me, the story that God is still writing to complete the grandest love story that will ever be written. You are a story that is part of that story. So take heart; the ending has already been written and it is a happy one.

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