runaway bride ...

i’ve been feeling a lot like julia roberts in ‘runaway bride’ lately -


she has spent so much time trying to be what everyone else wants her to be that she loses touch with who she is and what she likes ... how do you like YOUR eggs? ;) in a lot of ways, i’m unsure of who i am or what i like a lot of the time. a couple of weeks ago, i was pondering this while sitting at the computer and reading for book club (the queen of multi-tasking), when a friend popped up on chat and asked what my favorite color was. i laughed out loud at the timing. i hate questions like that because i never feel like i have an answer, or just one answer, anyway. while discussing this, i continued to read while waiting for her responses ... reading what i should have started at least a week earlier but had waited until just three days before book club ... and came across this passage: “in response to your surrender, God will do for you what you cannot achieve by any effort of your own: He will renew your mind. He will change the way you think. this includes your goals, your values, your attitudes, and your priorities.” i laughed again. God is not a God of coincidences.

as noted in my first entry, surrender is a word that has been on my heart for a while now. so, not only was God reiterating my need for surrender, but also reminding me that in surrendering myself, i would actually come to discover myself. hmmm ... sounds familiar (Matt. 10:39). my initial thought was to write REdiscover. however, as reemphasized by the passage above, i feel like God has been saying that He wants to give me a new self, redefining and replacing who i’ve thought myself to be for so long, with a whole new version of who He says i am. that is, however, the most disconcerting part of all. i’m somewhere between Him taking away (or me fully surrendering) all i’ve known to be true about myself and my life, and realizing ... or maybe it’s just embracing ... what God says is true about me. what’s left feels like a complete loss of identity. this can be seen as scary. i’m going to choose liberating. as the crowning ‘swing’ of this entry, i decided to look up how many times the word identity appears in the Bible. The NIV produced no results, but the last of six results in the NLT was 1 Peter 2:10, the verse that God gave me over two years ago: “once you had no identity as a people; now you are God’s people.” in all my striving and seeking, my answer is as simple as that.

God, do whatever it takes for me to find my rest in this promise.