I take comfort in knowing that you too have a little mess-up in your life. It makes me not feel alone. And yet that solidarity can be a trap. It can fool us into thinking that we are on the same team that must win at being screwed up. It can trick us into the comparison game: ‘Well, I am not as bad as so and so’, or ‘boy, I really screwed up, look at her, she’s messed up too, but is making good, I don’t think I can have the life change she has’.
What if we accepted ourselves as wholly screwed up while at the same time embraced Christ for what he did for us? Which is the removal of our sin, our shame, and our guilt. What if we took the truth of God’s word and wrapped it around ourselves like a mantle and let the truths settle on our shoulders and actually felt the weight truth?
I think I would be wholly changed.
I think that my messed up soul imprint would begin to take on the imprint of God himself and then I must ask myself if I am really as messed up as I believe or is my mess somehow being made beautiful.
Or I am just seeing myself, without the guilt and shame, as God sees me.
Wholly loved.
Wholly messy beautiful.
Can mess be beautiful? I must believe it or I would be crippled by the weight of regret and bitterness and unforgiveness. Every time I have turned over my regrets to my Abba Father, I come away encouraged that there is redemption. Every time I let go of bitterness I smell the fragrance of the rose rather than feel the prick of the thorns. Each time I choose forgiveness I am reminded of my own forgiveness.
Every time I offer my mess-up soul to him, I receive grace in return and that is wholly beautiful.
Receive grace. Will you offer your messed-up self to him and open your arms to receive his grace? Grace that changes us into a new kind of beautiful we cannot even begin to imagine. Grace that reveals truth. Truth that reveals grace.
Have you ever felt like you are standing with your hand waving in the air, ‘pick me, pick me?’ Maybe as adults we don’t really do that but I think we all have that desire to be picked. Chosen. We ask: Pick me for the job. Pick me because I have something valuable to offer. And sometimes it seems that everyone else is getting ‘picked’ except for you.
I can remember those school play yard games where two kids were picked as ‘captains’ for a rousing game of dodgeball and then proceeded to pick team members. I hated those days.
I was usually the last of the kids picked. It could be because I hated the thought of throwing a ball– hard!–on purpose at someone and having it thrown–hard!–at me. Ouch!
It’s not that I didn’t try at athletics. In middle school I tried track, basketball, and volleyball. I discovered I didn’t like running. Ugh. And I really didn’t like having a ball flying through the air at me. That ball always seemed to connect with my nose as evidenced by a permanent black and blue mark across the bridge of my nose that shows up when I am exhausted. I know, I know…my hands are for catching the ball, not my face.
But really? I think it was those traumatizing days of school yard dodge ball that made me hate trying to catch a ball or toss one over the net. Suffice it to say–I was not in the first round pick or the second or the third, but dead last. I tried not to let it hurt, I mean I completely understand why I wasn’t picked first, but being last? over and over? It felt like rejection to me. I was in a different elementary school every year, and every year became a year I could ‘start over’, but the outcome was the same: ‘last pick’.
It’s funny how we carry childhood wounds and hurts into our adult lives, some of those wounds being pretty obvious, but the innocuous ones, the ones that are easy to hide beneath bravado and arrogance and pride and independence, those are the ones that affect our lives in a subtle, but significant way.
One of the ways this epidemic of being picked last in is evidenced in the difficulty in accepting the truth that I am chosen by God–because he wants me not because he has to.
‘For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight,’ Ephesians 1:4. How about if we replace the pronoun ‘us’ with our name? What if we read it like this: ‘For he chose Jessica in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight’. Try reading it with your name in place of the ‘us’. What is your reaction? When I first allowed that truth to be revealed to me, I followed it with a ‘but…’.
But as I go deeper with God, this truth becomes something I cannot ‘but’ away, but need to face head on and decide if I am going to embrace this truth that God chose me, long before I raised my arm, waving, ‘pick me, pick me’. For this truth to become embraceable I need to lay aside the identity of ‘last pick’ and decide that God’s opinion is ultimately the most important one there is to cling to. He calls me chosen.
He picked me. He picked you. Long ago. Before we even got to the playground of life we were ‘picked’. Chosen. That’s part of your identity. That’s part of mine. That’s one of the words we should hear when we look into that mirror. Will you open your ears to hear that truth or are you stuck following it with a ‘but…’.
Friends, I pray that you will embrace ‘chosen’ as part of your identity and if embracing chosen is an area where you are strong in, find someone to encourage in that truth. Tell them God chooses them. Tell them that God picks them first. I’ll go first….
You are picked! By our loving, loving God. In fact he says:
Mirror mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all….
The face looking back at me runs through the litany of comments….
fat
ugly
selfish
prideful
wounded
graceless
blunt
tactless
opinionated
dominating
controlling
manipulative
jealous
this list could grow and continue and morph into whatever you see or hear when you look into the mirror.
Mirror mirror on the wall….you are a liar or maybe I am the one with the warped perceptions of myself.
I have seen the truth of these words in myself, but also within these words I have seen the lies.
The reality is that I can be domineering. I can be controlling. I can be ugly. I am wounded. I have wounded. I can be graceless. I can be blunt.
But the truth is that my wounds can be used for God’s glory. The truth is that when I wound, I can experience the beautiful gift of forgiveness. The truth is when I am domineering I have the opportunity to submit to the control of my holy, loving, gracious God. The truth is that all the parts of who I am–the good, the bad and the ugly– are all a part of me and who am I to reject what I see in the mirror. Rather than rejecting the ‘less than’ part of myself what if I were to offer those parts of me up to Jesus and surrender to whatever he wants to do to turn those weaknesses into a strength.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not giving myself license to be the worst side of me, I am giving myself grace to grow into the best side of me and that side is only found in Jesus Christ. If I am going to grow then I can expect failures. But failures are not a sign that I failed per se, they are an opportunity to grow in a specific tangible way. Only in him can we be our best and if we detect patterns of thought that produce our worst, and we don’t hold them up to him like a child holding up a broken lovey and saying ‘fix?’ then I am not submitting to whatever he wants to do to turn those weaknesses into strengths.
the truth within these words is that there is redemption through Jesus Christ.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all….
