God Speaking

“I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalm 139:14)

Last year I attended a fascinating seminar entitled, “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”. The guest speaker was a young lady who had a startling story to share with us. She was only a teenager when she was chosen, through a modeling contest, to join a high end fashion house. She soon found herself in Paris and working there was heady and exciting stuff for one so young, but what looked like a glamorous career for those who were observing these beautiful women parading down the catwalk, turned out to be quite the opposite. She discovered her self-worth was dictated by how thin she could keep her body so those beautiful designer clothes would be shown to their best advantage. She was even offered appetite suppressant pills to help her to do this.  She was constantly comparing herself to the other models, envying their glossy hair/ long legs etc. and even though in the eyes of the world she was very beautiful, she felt she never quite measured up, she was desperately unhappy. The great turn around happened to her while reading Psalm 139; she was suddenly made aware that she possessed a divine birthright. She had been designed by the Creator to be just as he had made her and fortunately for our speaker, she was able to recognise her mistake in accepting this lifestyle and with the help of her Christian parents was able to leave this career behind. She told us that when she grasped the true meaning from this verse (Psalm 139:14)

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well

She was flooded with relief and she has been sharing her experiences, especially with young women, ever since, helping them to accept themselves as wonderful creations of the Heavenly Father.

We don’t have to be a young teen age model to have self-doubts about our self-worth. Many of us have grappled with thoughts of never quite measuring up compared with others. We may have had this reinforced as children, with words like this;

“why don’t you do well at school like your brother”?

“why don’t you play sports like the girl next door”?

“why haven’t you more friends at school”?

Perhaps as we grow older we imagine more put downs for ourselves. We can think of all sorts of reasons why we do not measure up to those around us. This is when we need to stop and claim our birthright which our Heavenly Father has bestowed upon us.

When God decided to make mankind this is what he said,

“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness….” (Genesis 1:26)

And when he had finished this is what he said,

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good…” (Genesis 1:31)

How comforting to know we are exactly as God designed us to be! We are made in his likeness and God sees us as being very good.

We certainly come in all shapes and sizes with wide ranges of gifts and potential and the secret to claiming that birthright is to accept who we are and to strive to fulfill what God has planned for us to be, to his glory.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thought of it like this,

“I felt as though I was about to fill a space in the world that was meant for me and had long awaited me, a mold, as it were, made for me alone..”

When we hear our Heavenly Father whisper, “You were born to be you”, what a joy it is to accept our special space made for us alone.

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