I struggle at times with who I am.  Like a little girl with her nose pressed up on the cold glass, I peer into life from the outside.  Wishing for more than what it is.  A womb left hollow, empty from infertility.  A dream buried deep and fear making it hard to uncover.  Relationships laid low.  The list is too long – the breaking too deep.    

 So, her words this past month struck a chord hidden within. 

 “You can give up the need to compete in the world when you can accept you are complete in Christ.”*

How do you feel complete when so much has felt unfinished?  I have struggled to fill the cavernous holes with something, anything.  I have ventured from one to another looking for fullness.  More words pierce as she continues…

 “Until you are ultimately known you are ultimately nomadic.”*

She knows me.  I am cut to the core because she understands from where this heart travels.  Only one who knows this path of want and wishing – whose feet have wandered along similar steps – can speak these words with a surgeon’s precision.   She knows.  Then the words of John the Baptist fall from her lips…

“Apart from the gifts that come from heaven, no one can receive anything at all.”

John 3:27 The Voice

I can barely exhale.  My soul is impaled.  Could it be – my life’s portion a gift? 

 You see all things; nothing about me was hidden from You.  As I took shape in secret, carefully crafted in the heart of the earth before I was born from its womb…Every detail of my life was already written in Your book; You established the length of my life before I even tasted the sweetness of it. 

Psalm 139:15, 16b (The Voice)

I was wrought in the darkness of the beginning.   A work carefully crafted.  A life fashioned for sweetness – His not mine. 

 A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

Leonardo DaVinci

Her words are His brushstrokes of Light and I begin to see what was hidden in the depths.  The art is exposed.  Beauty revealed.  Redemption uncovered.    

She prods me not to be “seduced by the myth of scarcity”*  but to hold what I have been given in gratefulness. 

Her words remind me to study the Artist and “to live in trustful awe of your abundant God.”*   In the understanding of who He is I will come to know the art I am.

For we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in the Anointed, Jesus, to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago.

Ephesians 2:10 (The Voice)

The canvas does not create –  it submits.  It is only the Artist who can determine the completeness of His work and by His hands alone can the masterpiece is revealed. 

So let it be in me.

*Words of Ann Voskamp