Give Yourself the Freedom To Be Yourself (Why The World Needs You to Be You)

This post is the devotional that goes with a faux finish tutorial: Easy Pottery Barn Seadrift Finish on Furniture

If you have been around a four-year old for any length of time, you soon come to realize their expertise in question asking…endless, relentless questions.  As an introvert, I am amazed at my extrovert daughter’s capacity to ask a barrage of questions over such a long period of time, only stopping for minutes at a time to “reload”.

Here are a few o the questions that stick out in my mind:

• Why did my pet ants decide to go to heaven instead of making their tunnels?
• How did I watch Ipad when I was in your tummy?
• When is the cheeseball I planted outside going to grow into a cheeseball tree?

I can’t say I’m always attentive to these questions, with my answers often ranging from “I don’t know” to “why don’t you ask Daddy.”

However, there’s one question that would stop me in my tracks…

Can you imagine your child asking you “Mommy, am I enough…Am I smart enough?  Am I good enough?  Am I pretty enough?”  What would your answer be?

No doubt, you would stop what you are doing to reassure her she is more than enough – that you love her just the way she is and more than she can possibly imagine.

Now imagine how God would feel if we asked him the same question – “Am I enough?” 

Now, let’s stop and think about this for a minute.  If you are a parent, think how much you love your child and try to grasp the fact that God loves you exponentially more than that.

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! (1 John3:1).”  

When you look in the mirror in the morning what do you see?  Do you see a woman who isn’t ___(fill in the blank)___enough or do you see a woman with tremendous value because she is loved and cherished by her Creator.

God loves us more than we can possibly fathom, no matter how many times we yell at our kids or make snarky political comments on Facebook.  God is not waiting to love some future version of ourselves. 

He is absolutely thrilled with you in this very minute.  He loves you just as you are –  fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps. 139) and cheers you on daily.

Often social media is a barricade we can hide behind so the true world can’t see how unhinged we really are. The window we peer though into each other’s personas is rose-tinted.   No one shares their insecurity and fears about not being enough and the God-given peculiarities that make them uniquely them.  So we offer a cleaned up, whitewashed version of ourselves….at the very cost of being ourselves.

When we give a false impression of who we really are, we are saying that what we have to offer is not good enough.  “How God made me is not good enough.” 

However, authentic engagement means lowering your guard, allowing yourself to be vulnerable and attune to the fact that God loves you as you already are.

God designed us in His image (Gen. 1) and God promises to abide in us.  To abide means “to remain, he to or follow.”  We are also called to abide in Him which means keeping his commandments which encompasses loving the Lord with our hearts, soul and minds and to love others as ourselves (Matthew 22).

 “For anyone who hears the word but does not carry it out is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror, and after observing himself goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like (John 1:24,25).  

We are never more ourselves than we are abiding in Him by obeying His commandments and loving others.  When we withhold our true self from others, we limit what God wants to show others about who we really are – and how He works through us.

To “be yourself” means you submit control to be who God created you to be by abiding in Him.  By abiding in Him we allow His light to shine in us to empower us to be whom He created us to be.  Just like a prism, the colors of the rainbow cannot be defused without a source of light directed into it.   We glean hope from the one who infused hope into us.

When you look in a mirror, who do you see?  I pray you see a woman dearly loved by her God.

‘Til Next Time,