Stolen Thoughts

     These are some thoughts that I have gathered from other people.  I am not sure who.... but I wanted to share them as they touched my heart and might yours.
          You are worthy of love and belonging, and I, God, loves you.
          Let yourself be seen - deeply and vulnerably seen
          Love with your whole heart - even when there is no guarantee.
          Practice gratitude and joy when there are moments of terror.
          I have enough, I do enough, I AM enough.
          We are imperfect and hard wired for struggle when it comes
          Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
And there are more someplace around here...
     I have lived most of my life wishing all of this was true for and about me. Thank God (literally) that I can believe most of them about me most of the time!
     The belief of me NOT being worthy and NOT being enough has plagued me for as long as I can remember. That I actually don’t believe them is a sin. OK – how is that a sin?  It's like slapping His face and saying, "NO! you did not do try hard enough here!!" If I don’t believe that God made me a worthy person or a person who is enough in any way shape or form, I am believing that God has not kept His promises when He made me. God always keeps His promises.   Perhaps not as we think He should…….
     How does one become worthy of being alive? The 139th Psalm says that God “has searched me and knows me,” that He has “laid His hand upon me” and that I cannot “flee from his spirit.” It goes on to say no matter where I am His “hand will guide me, (His) right hand will hold me fast.” I believed from the time I was a little girl that I was filled with darkness. Not evil, but dark and icky just the same. The Psalm also assures me that “even the darkness will be not dark to you (God); the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” These are, for me, such assurances. So we don’t BECOME anything, we just ARE God’s blessed and worthy creation. We always have been/are/will be just that!
     There is a hymn, “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light,” partially based on these words. I will never forget the first time I heard and sang that song at an Episcopal Women’s Convention. I cried my way through the words of it. I claimed it as mine. I still do. If there is no “darkness at all, the night and the day are both alike,” then no matter how dark and gunky I was inside, He only saw my God light.
      This was the start of an 18 year process of emptying out the dark and gunky stuff and turning and trusting what the Psalm and song promised, that I was light. I have had to take some drastic measures to believe that I am worthy AND enough. I have had to leave behind a job, friends, family, a lifetime, and the love of my heart to finally see that it is only God’s opinion of me that matters. And His opinion is that I am a worthy, extraordinary, precious child of His.