Thursday, October 12th, 2023
Over the last few months, I have been in a season of discovering, or re-discovering, my identity. For much of my life I had lived with an unbiblical view of who I was. I did my best to fashion something that looked good and felt good, but inside a battle raged. There were pieces of my identity formed from the words of others, some from thoughts about myself, some from experiences of dark valleys I had traversed and a few pieces clinging to the truths that I had struggled to read in the Bible. Slowly but surely, God is exposing the illegitimate pieces of my identity with the light of His truth. Thankfully, He is patient and full of grace. It’s amazing to me how much of who I thought I was had truly been fashioned out of a need to protect myself and try to keep myself from falling apart.
Everyone has opinions as to which lies the enemy uses most often to try to keep us from our God-given destinies. The more I travel the road of righting my identity, I truly believe that the destruction of who God made us to be is at the very top of that list. Our culture as a whole is at the crossroads of this crisis. Sadly, many (like my younger self) do not understand the significant value God placed on us when He formed us in our mother’s womb. It’s no secret that the enemy works from day one of our lives to open up the doors of rejection, abuse, abandonment or whatever else he can to make us feel we are not worthy, we were supposed to be someone else, or we were not meant to exist.
As I was worshipping and praying on this topic a few days ago, God gave me a vision. I saw a dump truck with a full load of heavy boulders. Each boulder represented some part of my identity that I had amassed. These were not scriptural examples of identity. These had formed out of numerous experiences, words I had spoken or heard, and roads I had pursued thinking I would find fulfillment. In my vision, God wanted me to dump my load of boulders. As I was driving my truck, I was looking for a place to dump them where I could keep track of them just in case I needed one or more of them again. As soon as I dumped them however, the ground opened up and swallowed all of them. On one hand I knew I these were things that needed to go, but on the other hand there were feelings of, “Well now who am I?”
God has been speaking a phrase to me over and over these last few weeks often when I am singing in the Spirit, “He takes, and He gives; He empties, and He fills.” This was surely the emptying side of that equation. In my vision I kept waiting to see what He was going to fill my dump truck with. That phrase “He empties, and He fills” really is a promise, but it doesn’t come with a timeline. Just because He empties doesn’t mean He will automatically fill. There may be a “selah” in between those two actions. It may be a long selah or a short selah. However long it is, it will most likely stir up some feelings of vulnerability. It’s a spiritual nakedness where we have let go of the things of the flesh, but we are not really sure yet what our new clothing looks like. Before the beginning of 2023, God gave me a scripture for the year. It is Psalms 40:2:
2 He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my step.
Those boulders going into the depths were symbolic of my journeys into the pit and the miry clay. But He never intended for me to stay there. He pulled me, the real me, the me that He formed and fashioned, out of those dark and dirty places. And He is now in the process of setting my feet upon a rock and establishing my steps.
Final Thoughts…
With every step that God shows me, I am discovering it’s less and less about what He fills us with or what He gives us; it’s truly just about being with Him. He is sitting in the passenger seat of that dump truck with us. The One that called us forth into this earth and hovered over us in our mother’s womb wants to go everywhere we go and be a part of everything we do. He created us because He loves us; He loves us because He created us. He wants to tell us how many hairs are on our head and all His incredible thoughts about us. He wants to show us every lie the enemy tries to whisper in our ear that contradicts the Word of God. He wants to be the One we trust above all else, the One we love above all else and the One we look to when we need to be reminded who we are. It’s true for me and every single one of you. We are all that precious to Him.