By David ReayWednesday 4 Jul 2018LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 2 minutes
Read 1 Corinthians 1:26-28
26-28 Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? (THE MESSAGE)
If we are to live boldly, creatively, authentically for Jesus, we need to own our raw material. We need to accept that we are the products of those who loved us and who failed to love us. We can’t go back in history and get different parents and live in different homes. Whether our upbringing was dismal or delightful, it is the only upbringing we have.
Of course the powerful Holy Spirit can help us come to grips with all this; can help us not be captive to our past. While we cannot change our past, we can change the perspective we have on it. We can decline to let it dominate our present and future. We can begin the long and painful journey of forgiving those who twisted our early life stories out of shape. As those who have received grace, we can offer grace.
And yet, it remains that we are who we are. We are to write our ongoing life stories with due regard for our own raw material. We do not live in some idealised fantasy land, but live in the real world which may not be all we want it to be.
God takes hold of us as we are, fully aware of our life stories. He gets to work on us as we are and loves us as we are, not as he or we would ideally like us to be. He offers us new beginnings, but even these are shaped by what has gone before. Our histories are not ignored or airbrushed out of existence. They are merely woven into the new history he is writing for us here and now.
Blessings
David Reay