It is with a good bit of trepidation covered in boldness that I make the following confession: from my early years to my adult years, I have done things that warranted the following labels: thief, envious, unrealistic, fake, jealous, gossip, covetous, mean, liar, lazy, loose, coward, procrastinator, messy, disillusioned, “that girl”, unimportant, arrogant, slanderer, selfish, living in lala land, bad, easy, nobody…etc. The truth is, I continue to battle some of these same things today…I am not perfect and neither do I proclaim to be.
I don’t have all the answers to “How to live the perfect Christian life”, but I do know this, over the past 10 years or so, God as gotten a hold of my life and has begun to peel back layer upon layer of the negative labels. The process has been one of the most painful experiences of my life. For example, in order for me to not be known as arrogant, I had to be humble…and boy did He humble me. I had to be brought low to truly understand the depravity of my own soul and appreciate how much I am NOT better than anyone else. I have learned that if I constantly maintain a posture of bowed head and bent knees before the Lord, it’s hard for me to stand with a puffed up chest.
Back to the layers…One of the greatest things that I love about the Lord is His attentive care that He places on me as He peels away the layers of negative labels. I liken this process to that of a nurse caring for a burn victims wounds. I came before the Lord with disease festering wounds with scabs forming over them. The Lord would carefully remove the scabs, clean out the disease, and place a fresh bandage on top; that way new healthy skin could grow. He removed the label of nobody, placed people in my life and gave me scripture that helped me process what my identity was, then covered me with the labels FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE…CHILD OF THE KING. Layer by layer. Wound by wound. God made sure that I no longer owned those labels. He’s given me new ones and I am secure in that.
I’m NOT what I WAS for I KNOW what I AM!
