We are God's Workmanship

The Spirit calls today after a retreat to the ocean with women from my fellowship. The time was a much needed break but not like one normally would expect. My much needed break was to get away from comfort zones and safe routines. To venture out into the dark unknown world of other women. To be stimulated by thoughts outside my own head, exposed to opinions not flowing from my own life experiences and dealing with potential rejection always wondering about acceptance if people only knew the "real" me.

I have noticed over the course of my life that there is a fine line between not caring what others might think about me and not allowing what others might think to distort who I am.

The Spirit calls me to sweet fellowship. The retreat was wonderful, the women warm and welcoming, the message was straight from God's lips to my ears. But I sense that in thinking about my own feelings of awkwardness and fear of rejection, there is a bigger message to be gleaned from this experience.

We each have our own unique identity and calling, known since the beginning, not of our life, but since the beginning of time itself.

Psalm 139:13-16 says, "For You created my inmost being and knit me together in my mother's womb....your eyes saw my unformed body, all the days ordained for me were written in your book"

Ephesians 2:10 says, "For we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do".

There it is laid out before us: The Sovereign God of all creation, the One who saw us before we could even begin to reckon time, has a plan and a calling for us and has infused our being with the gifts, strengths and talents to fulfill that calling as He watched over our development in our mother's womb.

We are no mistake! We are not just a random bunch of cells that collided and stuck together. Our passion and interests are at base, God designed and God ordained.

The Holy One calls us to trust Him to reveal who we were created to be, not just to the world around us, but more importantly, to ourselves. In the long process, we must not listen to outside voices trying to make us into what they want us to be. There is the temptation to live up to "expectations" that have been imposed over all of us for all of our lives, but not by our Maker.

The Holy Spirit is calling to each one of His Chosen to think about our passion, for therein lies our gift; the gift that we were created to develop and share, anointed and empowered by the One who "knit us together while we were in our mother's womb". The Spirit is calling and asking us to allow Him to reveal our unique glory.

We have been taught so much about original sin and how it has distorted our entire existence. But we never have been taught to think even a little bit about the original glory of having been created in God's Glorious image.

Jesus came to restore the broken lineage between us and our Creator. Through Him we can have the legacy of glory restored. By the death and resurrection of our Savior and the subsequent release of the Holy Spirit, we have the potential to live in the Holy, Glorious conforming image of the Son of God.

While we are yet trapped in our decaying flesh, to walk in the Spirit and live out our "calling" under the anointing of the Holy One is our potential on earth. Awkwardness and fear of rejection must be overcome by confidence in the One who has created us and called us and ordained us for good works that flow through our gifts.

The Spirit is calling. Can you hear Him?