By David ReayMonday 12 Aug 2019LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 2 minutes
You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
Your workmanship is marvellous—how well I know it. (NLT)
We live in an age when so many people define themselves by being victims, being marginalised, being offended or forgotten. And we can never simply dismiss such feelings because people can experience all these painful things.
And yet, the danger is that we may begin to get our identity from these things. I come to see myself as ‘the unjustly treated one’ or ‘the unlucky one’ rather than as a creation of God who does indeed experience such situations. In other words, I may well be a victim, downtrodden, even despised. I need not deny that.
But when we focus on these things to such an extent that they define who we are, we have lost our bearings. We may come to morbidly obsess about them and let that understandable chip on our shoulder become a gigantic log.
We are, irrespective of our life situations, the masterpieces of the divine creator. This is our true identity behind all the other ways we and others may see ourselves. I may be a victim of various oppressions but this is secondary to the fact that I am God’s wonderful creation who has happened to suffer in life.
I choose not to be defined by what has happened to me in my life but by who has brought me into this life in the first place.
Blessings
David