If you haven’t been trekking with me for long, you wont know that it was a crazy whirlwind when I felt the Lord nudge me to apply. Last year in January, God had spoken a few things, one of them being that “there was going to be a surprise at the end of the year”. There are several other things that I might have guessed that would have happened but the World Race just wasn’t on my radar. He spoke, and I listened, surprised, I moved forward with applying a week before training camp.
The application process includes several pages of questions and confessions of all that you have dealt with in your past. I didn’t have a problem being an open book and laying all of it out in the open. Being honest is freeing and I take pride in keeping my closets skeleton-free, but I still remember the question that I felt uncomfortable with…
First she asked me, “Who do you say that God is?” and that was so incredibly easy for me to pour out who He is to me, who He has shown Himself to be and how much I love and trust Him with my life.
Then she asked me, “Who does God say that you are?” and I paused, and found myself speechless, with nothing coming to mind except typical Christianese answers. I spit out a few I knew she would be happy with and in a few short minutes, we hung up and I sat there. And then He spoke.
“You lied on your applicaton.”
He began to call me out in being able to describe and put into words all that He is to me but how I struggle to answer all that I am to Him.
He has a way of speaking so gently but firmly and sternly at the same time. He began to sweetly admonish me that although my confidence and my foundation IS in who He is, and I do walk with Him and know His voice that I have yet to really sit down and let Him speak to me who I am. I struggle with believing good things about myself and often find my vision of myself is distorted like a circus mirror. I struggle to feel encouraged when people tell me things about myself as if throwing something up against a brick wall, and watching it hit it and slide down. I find it hard to believe when someone tells me I am beautiful or that I am worth it. I feel like I DO know that to some degree and carry myself in such a way. A lot of times I base that on who He is and not who I am. I find it easy to call out the beauty and see the treasure in other people but would find it hard to make a list of things I find in myself to be lovely.
I want those deep questions of who I am
to be answered by the great I Am.
I know I can’t look for the resolve of the cries of my heart in any person and I want it to be settled by Him so that when I DO receive a compliment it is just icing on the cake. It makes it a lot easier to smile and say, “thank you” when you already know deep down in your core that you are amazing and beautiful and wanted because the Creator told you so.
