Flirting With DarknessSample

Weapon #3: See Yourself As God Sees You

If you find yourself checking in on Instagram and start to feel like a failure, remember that everything isn’t always as it appears and that comparison is a terrible trap.

You might feel you aren’t good enough, but that is just a lie.

Here’s the deal: You are not a mistake. You are a masterpiece. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. In God’s eyes, you are far more interesting than you know. Psalm 139:17-18 says that God’s thoughts toward you outnumber the grains of sand. Do you know how many that is? According to people who spend their time looking into such things, the earth has roughly 7.5 x 10 to the eighteenth power grains of sand, which equates to about seven quintillion, five hundred quadrillion grains.

That’s quite a few.

It’s a poetic way of saying that God can’t take His mind off you. He is totally smitten.

Further, in that same psalm, David writes of God, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Which means you were carefully crafted. You were planned and shaped and constructed to be one of God’s masterpieces.

This means that there is nothing about you that is a result of chance. It’s all artistry. Every one of the approximately 75 trillion cells in your body, each one containing hundreds of thousands of molecules. Every cell contains six feet of DNA containing more than 3 billion letters of coding. On top of that, you have 206 bones, countless proteins that collide with each other a billion times per second, and a brain with 100 billion interconnected neurons, each with ten thousand connections and synapses.

Yes, we are something special; the creation of the Master Artist.

Each of us is unique. I have never heard a fish asking why bad things happen to good fish. Nor have I read a poem about love’s trans-dimensional transcendence written by a velociraptor. We members of the human race are unique, made in the imago Dei, the image of God, capable of rationality and profundity as well as of creating awesome practical jokes and inventing the Disneyland churro!

God wants to take you, oddness and all, and use you for His own purposes. Your oddness and shame can become your glory. Your crazy dreams can become the thing that takes you to your next level.