Truthfully there is no bigger disdain than to hear from a parent that you are not the child they wanted. This statement is not to be confused with a parent saying they never wanted children, as that would indicate a more personal and responsible utterance. This is, rather, the woeful indignation of not being something which you could never be by very existence. Nobody told me I needed to be something else before I was expected to pay for being that wrong me and with zero way for me to be that someone else desired. Ah, the plight of just being. I can catch parts of me sometimes searching to replicate a fix for that - to find out who I need to be in a relationship - to be that person in order to keep/maintain that relationship. Praise be to God I no longer suffer from that vortex of stability/instability. Any trace of that it is more like distance waves of a past remembrance of feeling. I know who I am now and am blessed that my very existence is plunged deeply into the vine of Christ. I am far more stable than I could ever imagine to be and am at the very core healthy. I am healing. What is healing?
If we look at a bandaged skinned knee the healing which takes place initially is that of preventative. Your body immediately sends a concerted effort of red and white blood cells to ward off any pathogens. With modern medicine, we give our bodies a break, by aiding in anti-inflammation so our bodies can quicken to the secondary reparative healing process. My soul is in, and all of our souls are in, a constant reparative healing state - and the reparative healing state gives way to the eventual thriving state…which is coincidentally where this healing knee metaphor dies. We would not want a continued growth once a skinned knee is completely repaired. That’s called cancer. What is alive, however, is not a metaphor, but a truth about our greater healing in Christ.
Our souls and lives are damaged constantly when we cling to disobedience and sin. We do damage to ourselves and others by electing ourselves as the authority and live out our own desires without the relationship with the One who created us. This fact should not be misconstrued with the words my mother told me. What she told me was vile and the Lord protected me from the truth of her disgust, that I would not be “Lydia, who did ballet…or the daughter who cleaned well enough for a man to marry”. At that moment the Lord provided the prayer to say “God forbid” to her and to walk away knowing that even though that was my reality at the time it would not be so forever and that I was indeed a different child than who my Mom wanted me to be. I was a child of God no matter how vile I felt I was supposed to feel to be.
God in His richness and mercy did not create us flawed. No, He created us in His very image and that which resisted God - or what is the void of God, the absence and rejecting of all that IS God - which would then (theoretically as I am not a theologian) be as vast and as vile as the inverse of the omniscience, omnipotence, and all Holy God. More dead than dead. God is and that which rejects God is evil, it is cut off and dead, winding and never-ending, and exists only as that which refuses to hold God as God. It is the cold as God is the heat. It is the dark as God is the light. Darkness only exists because there is no light. It has only to do with the acceptance or rejection of light. God created us in His image. When we rejected God by attempting to be God ourselves, we then became the very child He did not make us be and no, He did not reject us - He brought us a way to become again His child in the obedience and fulfillment of His Son. He then imparted to us the very thing which we did not know we could be, and in doing so provided us with a way to be who He originally designed us to be. We are His Sons and Daughters through adoption, we are His children, and the Bride of His beloved Son. He is in us and we in Him. Lydia will be the girl I will never be, but Gabrielle is more than fine as God’s daughter.
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