I stood up uncomfortably from the couch, and I could feel as my fingers spun over and over around the hard edges of my wedding band. We began to sing and as the words began to leave all of our broken in our own ways lips, I couldn’t help but feel a knot in my stomach.
…………and in that very moment I realized I was where I should be.
Right here in this exact moment of vulnerability.
Placed smacked in the middle of a variety of woman in a million different stages.
That ultimately we had all been brought here to get back to the very one who has made us and shaped us in to who we have become.
That ultimately we had been lead right back to Him.
Maybe it was an in the moment response but I stood at the front of the room thankful. Thankful that I had talked myself in to making the time to come….but most of all I thankful of WHO I was, whom I have become….in Him,
Two years ago….. four years ago to be exact, I sat in a hospital bed experiencing the after pains of birth as I held a tiny one and a half pound perfect but so ever still baby girls hand…..as I counted fingers and toes and acknowledged similar facial features of relatives , I was lost.
I was lost because I had been waiting until I got my life together before I got involved in a serious relationship with Him…..when the entire time it was the relationship I needed first to get my life back together.
I spent the first couple of years desperately trying to find a place in this new world to fit in. I compared myself to others in small groups. I strived to be that perfect image that so many were able to portray, and I became frustrated when every attempt of that very thing ended in a failure.
I prayed for direction. I felt as I was standing at the end of a road with a million different paths. Like I could tell the for sure ones that I didn’t want to take but for some reason I could not decipher the exact one to. I struggled between choosing the mediocre, because that was what I was after all.
I was the girl with the troubled marriage, the one who had been tested not once but twice with the death of her children, I was the foster child whom her mother had given away like a used item, I was the girl in school who everyone walked past with judging eyes when my baby bump was not able to be hid beneath my fuzzy gap sweater any longer.
Surely I was not created even remotely close for anything other than to be.
But I was so wrong. I had let the world brand and break me into the nobody I thought I deserved.
Except the world did not make me.
God did.
God made me….shaped me, not to be the woman sitting next to me. I was uniquely made for the purpose of serving Him, of living in Him in my own way.
I was useless as a mere copy of someone else, but as me…as myself….. he provided the power to do amazing things.
…and I suddenly realized that I was on the journey to becoming the woman that God has intended for me to be. That he has already been directing me down the paths that have led to endless possibilities of faith, and realtionships, and healing.
That most importantly he has freed me from those labels long before I even received them.
So here I sit, imperfect……… Perfectly imperfect in Him. Not striving for the look of perfection but learning to embrace the not. By understanding that with the struggles and storms in our lives…the ones that strip you down to the very core are oppourtunities to find yourself not only in the One who carried you through them, but as a way to be able to help others find Him as well.
Because the truth is I couldn’t do this alone.
Because the truth is you don’t have to.
Because you are worth far more than rubies.
Its time for us as woman to stop living in the mediocre places in our world and to start living in the amazing plans God has for us.
Because in Him is the best that we can be.
Because in Him …….we are able.
Four years later I am so very thankful to be able to say that.
Tutu Soon 