Happy Friday to you!
This morning I was playing around with my daughter, trying to make her laugh. I quoted a line recited by Viola Davis's character in the movie The Help, "You is kind, you is smart, you is important!" I was just fishing for a smile, but I began to think about that statement. I really do pray my daughter grows up to be a woman full of confidence and knowledge of how valuable her life is. In a world that constantly teaches that being yourself isn't enough, it's imperative that we have a strong sense of self worth, and instill that in our children.
We leave our houses and see billboards of airbrushed and photoshopped models. We turn on our televisions or computers and see advertisements that try to convince us that a said product can make us more beautiful, thinner, cooler, lighter, darker, thicker, etc. People size us up everywhere we go. We aren't acceptable as God created us; we need improvements! Well, it's time to STOP buying into this message. So many of us are living with an identity crisis because the world says we're flawed. We need to start remembering that we were made by, and in the image of, a perfect God who doesn't make mistakes.
As a kid, I was crippled by my lack of self worth, which ended up becoming self hatred. I started trying to fix myself at eight by falling into a viscous cycle of anorexia and bulimia. I had just started being picked on at school for the clothes I wore, the length of my hair, my teeth, my speech, the way I walked, etc. In subsequent years, I got so uncomfortable being in my own skin that I couldn't walk in crowds of people without holding onto something. I became a cutter, a paranoid hermit crab, even a drunk at one point. All of this because I believed I wasn't good enough.
I wish now that someone had taken the time to help me see my identity in Christ. Tell your children who they are and whose they are and know it for yourself. Tell them the Lord loves them without conditions. The Lord is a friend. Tell them they can be one in spirit with Christ and blessed with every spiritual blessing in heaven. Tell them in Christ they are alive and made new. Tell them they were worth dying for. Tell them they are children of the KING! Please, remember who you are when the world makes you feel like you don't make the cut. Until next time,