.lessons learned and constantly relearned.

i wrote this a few months ago but still find it incredibly relevant to my everyday life so i thought i'd share :

comparing yourself to other people is simply a waste of time. and yet i do it all the time, and maybe you do too. it sometimes seems that everyone else has it better off. a girl might be prettier. might get the guy. have the cute clothes. have the perfect life. she's the girl who has it all. sometimes it feels like i get the short end of the stick, and i spend so much time wallowing in all of it. and tonight God finally smacked me in the head and it all clicked.

in bible study we were studying matt 5, the beautitudes, the sermon on the mount. and in those first 13 verses Jesus says "blessed are the meek, those who mourn, the poor" all the characteristics of people we don't naturally admire. in this world, and i speak for myself, we admire the strong, the beautiful, the wealthy. like i mentioned earlier, it's the girl who has it all that you wish you were. and that's when God shot that down for me. because according to Him, it's the broken that he loves on, that he admires, that he exhorts. God doesn't give a squat about the things that we care about. he looks at the heart, and no matter what others think of you, HE loves you.

i love to think that we are all part of a huge puzzle. God's puzzle. like a puzzle, each of us is shaped in a certain way. we are molded, by God, in order to fit into the piece of the puzzle that can only be ours. we are designed uniquely. a certain part of the picture is painted on us in order to complete the whole image. if we ignore who God created us to be, if we try to replace who we truly are by trying to be someone else, then that piece of God's plan is missing, and his picture will not be complete. i always imagine God sitting in heaven, looking down at this earth, looking down at His creation...sometimes grieving, sometimes with joy. and when He looks down, He expects us, as His children, to have found our place in his picture, to be living in exactly the way he created us to live. you can't fight it. God made you, and Psalm 139 says He's already got it all figured out...so why do we try so hard to be someone different? why do we fight the mold, fight the shape, and inherently go against our very selves. He saw us before we were even created, before we were even conceived. He knows.

tonight, after a stressful past few days, God once again reminded me that i am created in his image. he reminded me that without him, i am nothing. he reminded me that i am who i am and no one can take my place. you are who you are, and no one will ever be able to replace you, no one can ever take your place in the puzzle.