See Yourself as God Sees You

When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

Do you immediately find fault with yourself? Are your thighs too big, your nose crooked, your lips too small, or your hips too wide?

Or are you able to see beauty?

I’ve been in both places. I have spent years stuck in a warped view of myself, unable to see who I really was, and I have experienced the healing of a renewed mind.

For too many years, I set my standards high. My expectations were impossible to live up to, and my striving only resulted in overwhelming anxiety. I wore myself out trying to gain what was unachievable. I sought perfection and always seemed to fall short. It wasn’t until I realized my thinking was off that I began to search out my healing.

Although I recognized there was a connection between my thoughts and my feelings, my feelings hadn’t always been a good indicator for me. I didn’t trust them. They seemed ever-changing and unreliable, at best.

Yet when God invited me to search them out with him, and move from the voices inside my head to listening to his voice,—I can't describe it but—I felt peace.

There is great comfort in being able to trust the One who is whispering in your ear.

For such a long time I was accustomed to believing the messages replaying inside my head. Yet there was something inside of me that believed I could rewrite my script. I felt like a victim who wanted to rise above her circumstances and overcome the destructive behaviors of her past. I longed to have a new story line, a new plot, and even a new main character. I thought I was the problem. I didn't know I was made perfectly in his image.

Yes, God had something new for me, but it was completely different than what I expected. It required me to trust, but my trust was damaged. I had to learn to accept God’s view of who I was as a gift.

I needed to invite him into my world and give him the sacred space to reshape my identity.

I found the more I connected with him in that space, the more I was compelled to heal. I began discovering who I was, my likes and dislikes, which was both strange and enlightening. When you live your life solely for others, you lose a large part of who you are, and it takes time to rediscover yourself again.

God lovingly led me into the pages of his word, where I found myself written all over his story. And as my mind experienced the amazing power of his restoration, my heart experienced the presence of his peace.

Perhaps, this is one of the most beautiful challenges of the Gospel, to receive a gift we have not earned.

God’s word is an invitation for us to accept this gift, his life-giving truth, which restores and heals every one of us. And when we are able to freely live from the place of God’s truth, we live a life completely empowered by his Spirit.

Finding who we are in Christ is a journey of discovering who God is and just how much he loves us. It is full of healing and experiencing his peace, but it requires us to trust who he says we are.

This is his gift, the gift of remaking and restoring us in him.