Living Life with Faith, Hope, and Love
I’m 3rd of 4 in my family. Definitely the middle child since the first two are only 14 months apart.
I was the quiet one growing up, never as loud or fast as the others. They were capable, I was afraid to try. I was the “sensitive” one, easily hurt, always hiding.
I knew early on God loved me, but I couldn’t figure out why. I had nothing to offer like the others did.
It’s taken a lifetime for me to accept that God doesn’t want anything from me except to love Him back. I can’t earn His love, certainly don’t deserve it. Understanding that gives me great hope for the immediate future and for eternity.
The same is true of you. You are loved, not because you’re quiet or loud, fast or slow, the one onstage or the one in the audience, but because He created you. You are loved because He chooses to love you.
So who are you?
And who gets to decide?
While I didn’t set out with this theme in mind, all of my stories lean into wrestling with identity. In so many instances, a character's journey is informed by an identity he or she accepts from someone else. The men and women in my novels struggle to take off names formed by societal norms, or other people’s opinions, or who they thought they should be, and instead put on the identity given to them by the One who made them: dearly loved & set free.
Isn't that true for all of us? We give too much weight to the opinions of others and too little to the opinion of our Creator God. In the verse below, know that YOU are God's special possession. Valued, priceless, worth dying for. He wants you and me to be who He created us to be, to proudly take our place in His Kingdom and live with unshakeable faith in Him, hope in the future, and love for Him and those around us.
"But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light."
1 Peter 2:9
