Reaching For Joy // Ever-Present PeaceSample

You, the Most Beautiful Puzzle

You are curious about how you are designed—how your choices shape your past and future.  You are curious about timing, about details, about how this moment happened, and then the next one too. 

I have designed you to walk alongside Me. You are My son. You are My daughter. I love being with you. Your mind, your ideas, your personality—all were created by Me. But they were also shaped by outside influences. Your environment. Your family. Your culture. Your experiences. Your choices in this world.

Each influence shapes you, some more than others. They affect your thinking, your feelings, your decisions about each moment, your thoughts about your future. 

Listen, son, daughter. You are not meant to have this puzzle all figured out, how these pieces fit together to make your life. It is a life-sized jigsaw with no picture on the front of the box. The finished masterpiece a mystery to you. But I see it. I know it. I love the finished beauty of it. It is exquisite. You are exquisite. Unlike any other.

I look at the individual pieces, and I know how they are put together. I know the colors, the patterns—and how it is the shape, ultimately, that makes a piece fit together or not. I don’t fit the pieces together. I let you do the work, make the choices, decision by decision. But yet I know the end result. The magnificence of it. The light that shines when another piece, and then another, is put together. 

Yes, the patterns are intricate, the choices of where one piece fits, rather than another, sometimes overwhelming. But I know how you are put together. Let Me show you. I’ve got you figured out, you see. 

So, it is good to long for answers, to seek understanding for why you do the things you do. It is okay to want to dig deep, increase self-awareness, ask Me to search your heart and show you what it is I see. For My sight is different than your sight. My vision of who you are is different—and more beautiful and glorious—than you can ever now see. So ask Me, ask Me what it is I see when I look at you. Ask Me what it is that makes the details of your personality difficult for you to accept and love. Ask Me why you do that thing again—that thing you hate but yet still do. 

You are the most beautiful puzzle I have ever seen. Each piece exquisit. For the image on the box is glorious, stunning. It takes my breath away when I see it. For, no matter rough edges of personality, all is made beautiful. Ask Me how I know. Ask Me to help you explore this puzzle further. 

Exercise:

It can be shocking just how asleep we can be to why we do certain things. Most of us are just pretty darn unaware of how our personalities shape our decisions, our habits, our relationships, our lives.

What I mean by “personality” is sometimes also called the false self. These are the things—the defense mechanisms, the coping mechanisms—we pick up during our lives, often when we are young, to deal with all the things coming at us. For example, a person might go through a season of questioning his or her self-worth and decide he or she needs to prove it by being productive or achieving certain things. Or a person might experience a significant loss and seek to avoid grief with distraction or working too hard. There are many other possibilities, of course. These are just two examples of mechanisms we use.

Being passive, avoiding conflict, avoiding having to make decisions, seeking escape and numbing pain, throwing ourselves into work, being manipulative, being deceitful, giving into rage, seeking to use or control other people—we’ve all done stuff we aren’t proud of in the name of protecting and comforting ourselves. Things become worse, though, when one or more of these come to define too much of our lives.

Beatrice Chestnut says personality is “necessary up to a point to interact safely in the world,” But, she says, it can also be the means by which we lose touch with our ‘true selves. This “true self,” she says, “gets buried in the background as our ‘false self’ comes to the forefront to deal with life.”

We become our false selves, we lose our true selves—and we don’t even realize it.

But if we we don’t understand our true selves, and why we’re having trouble letting go of our false selves, how can we ever get better? How can we ever make progress toward healing and wholeness? How can we ever become the men and women God created us to be?

The answer is, we can’t.

We need some level of self-awareness to move forward. We need some revelation.

And in the message we just heard, Holy Spirit offered just that. He said, Ask Me what it is that makes the details of your personality difficult for you to accept and love. Ask Me why you do that thing again—that thing you hate but yet still do.” 

So, let’s do it. Right now. Let’s ask Him.

God, I need your help. Help me to see my false self more clearly. Help me better understand how I protect myself and comfort myself—and how I hurt other people.

And show me where it all started.

Now tell me what is true. Tell me how You are willing to protect and comfort me—and how I don’t need to do it anymore. Tell me how You are there for me. Tell me I can trust You. Speak into my thoughts now. Give me words or let me see a picture in my mind and answer this question: God, what is true?

What is He showing you?

Friend, this is just the beginning of a journey long and hard and beautiful too. Going on this journey is how we get better. It’s how we access more of the joy and peace God has for us. It’s how we become the men and women we’re meant to be.

And it doesn’t happen overnight. And we can’t do it alone.

The good news is that God loves each one of us, just as we are right now. But, He also loves us too much to let us stay as we are right now. So, let's trust the One who knows us, the One who loves us, and let’s keep moving forward.