Fierce Free and Full of Fire: 5-Day Devotional Exemplo

I sincerely believe that God loves you and me like a concerned parent who never stops caring.  Every one of us is precious, wanted, and crafted with a purpose. God knows you and me because He had a real hand in forming our existence.  He created our inmost being.  Your inmost being is a masterpiece of divine creativity, and whatever you discover in mining the depths of your soul, it is glorious for the world and was always meant to be.  You are loved, and your inmost being is worth uncovering.

Our understanding of who we are comes into focus, the longer we reside in adulthood. Early on, it is still tangled up in childhood and adolescence, norms and expectations—unchallenged by real life. As someone not naturally self-aware, it took plenty of lived adult years for me to finally notice that whom I was inside was not the same person I projected. This is the exact meaning of disintegration—to separate into parts or to lose intactness.  When the inner or "real" you behave differently in one environment versus another, the acceptance of your core self begins to dismantle.  This is an unhappy and unhealthy way to live.

The depths of this internal clarity strengthens with age.  In my twenties, I would have been in an adjacent zip code. In my thirties, I moved into the neighborhood, and here in the middle of my forties, I’m home.

That said, if you have moved through a couple of decades, you may notice that some of your interior patterns have changed, or at least developed in an ancillary direction. This is normal, a combination of maturity and increasing self-awareness.