Since my trip to India embarks in two weeks, I spent this last week completing my assignment of preparing my personal story. It’s simple, really, to dig back into the past and remember what God has done for me. How He stepped down from the heavens and made Himself incredibly, breathtakingly real in my eyes. I realized last night that I should do this more often, for it never fails to fill me with wonder.
I don’t have a dark, ugly past that haunts me. I was born and raised in a Christian home by parents who have done a marvelous job in teaching me what unconditional love is, and more importantly, Who unconditional love is. But while I knew all sorts of things about Jesus, I never really knew Him. I knew the Sunday School answers like I knew the answers on my history tests. Although I had given my heart to Jesus when I was a small child, I didn’t fully grasp the idea of what a relationship with Him should look like.
Then, in God’s providence, I opened a book and read the words: “In a busy, noisy world, a little girl walks onto a dark stage and begins to perform.” As her story unfolded before my eyes, I found that it was my own. And when God showed up and invited that little girl to dance with Him, I found myself accepting the invitation.
In that moment, God became so real and alive and vibrant to me. Since that day, I’ve found myself captivated by the thrill of God’s Divine Dance. There’s such a joyous freedom in knowing that I don’t have to perform or pretend any longer. God accepts me just as I am. He loves me in spite of my flaws.
God has given me a story that is completely my own, but so closely resembles what He wants to do for every other person on the planet. If your story hasn’t yet been written, check out the invitation God offers you today. And if you know exactly what story I’m talking about, I invite you to once again lose yourself in the wonder of what God has done for you.
your mother once force-fed down your throat, the situations God allows into our lives are for a purpose; they help us grow.
Ever since I read Shannon Kubiak Primicerio’s The Divine Dance, I’ve been enthralled by a dancing God. It’s the language God and I speak to each other. Still, I’ve always envisioned Jesus as a Carpenter. I think of the way He molds and shapes us into the image He envisioned us to be from the beginning. And I felt as if that image had just been placed in my hands, a permanent reminder of the person God is continually shaping me to be.
For most of my life, my morning consisted of throwing on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, running a brush through my hair, looking in the mirror and saying, “Eh, God said that it was good.” Perhaps you would never look at me and think that I was insecure. After all, I never buried my flaws under a pile of make-up. But deep in my heart, the root of the problem was the same. I was never more than “good enough.” But then I wondered…
A friend of mine recently wrote a blog post about unearthing new ground. Now, maybe it’s partially because I witnessed some of these struggles Mandy wrote of uprooting, but I found myself deeply moved by her post. You can read the whole thing 
Beyond Waiting 