I love when God uses my most vulnerable and unexpected moments to teach me something new. It makes me feel so loved and it always reminds me that He has His hands in every area of my life.
My mindset in life has always been that I need to follow a certain set of guidelines so that I can makes something of myself. So that I can become something. So that I can make other people proud of me. I need to get good grades, have a job, join this club, plan this event, look this way, talk this way, etc. all in order to feel accepted by the world. For some reason, I have this idea that unless I do everything right I won't be good enough. There's always something more I could do, or say, or make.
MORE! MORE! MORE!
It's a never ending cycle and it's also one that is destined for failure.
When I was at training camp, Holly, one of our leaders, came up to me during one of our worship times and she prayed over me. At this point, I had never met Holly. Never seen her, talked to her, nothing, but she prayed for me like she loved me as a sister.
First of all, the fact that she prayed over me, someone whom she had never met, made me feel so accepted by her and like I was in a safe place. Then, when she finished praying for me, she took me by the shoulders and she said:
"God told me to tell you that He's proud of you. He wants you to know that He loves to show you off. He says you are one of His beautiful daughters and that He loves you so much."
This was probably the best news I had ever heard in my life. God was proud of me. He was proud of Abby Borland.
I didn’t have to get straight A’s, work two jobs and balance school, I don’t have to be a talkative extrovert, I don’t have to fit a certain perception of beauty, I don’t have to have my life together.
Just.
Loves.
Me.
I didn’t have to become something.
I have to be nothing.
Philippians 2:5-7 tells us that Jesus made himself nothing. It says, “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”
Jesus became nothing and God was pleased with him! He was proud of Jesus; just like He’s proud of me!
In order to become more like Jesus I must become less. Hard work and school and extra activities are all great, but they’re all for nothing if in the end I’m working for acceptance from my friends or my family, peers, professors, or in short, the world.
It can’t be about making me look good or like I’m doing something worthwhile. The next year of my life is about becoming nothing so that the people I encounter have a chance to experience the same kind of love that I know. It’s so that I will be able to tell them that God takes pride in them and that He loves to show them off to the world.
To quote Mumford & Sons, “I ain’t ever lived a year better spent in love.”
That’s exactly what I intend to do. I’m going to spend the year loving people more than I have in my entire life in order to become nothing so that God can become everything.
