Wednesday, June 2, 2010

In My Beginning


Psalm 139:13-15
For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skilfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

I love words and the images they can conjure. When I read these words I can almost see God’s hands moulding me as if I were clay. I can see Him taking his time to smooth out the rough parts, using His creative vision to add personality and life to me, His masterpiece. I can see that He thought of everything, every cell, every organ, every system, and every personality quirk. He designed and made me and I am marvellous.

When I was a child I thought it was pretty cool that God made Adam and Eve. He MADE them. He used His hands, His words to form these two perfect people. I also thought it was a bit of a rip off that these two people were perfectly made by God and I got stuck with the shoddy genetics of my family. My hair was too thin and mousy brown, my skin was too pale and covered with freckles but Adam and Eve were perfect. They had to be, God made them.

It wasn’t only the physical aspect of perfection I thought about. I figured that Adam and Eve would have been perfect in other ways, too. They must have had extreme intelligence, talent and goodness in them. And when I measured myself against this standard there was no comparison, I was leagues behind.

I thought this way for a long time and harboured a little resentment toward God for this injustice. I didn’t see how it was fair that God used all His creativity for these two people and the rest of us were just science experiments, destined to be whatever genetics could piece together. But everything changed as I began to understand my God and His way of doing things.

I was taught that God loves us, all of us, the same. I read Acts 10:34 where it says that God is no respecter of persons. But it wasn’t until I really understood in my heart that God doesn’t play favourites, that what He has, who He is, and how He loves is the same for everyone that I began to see that Adam and Eve were not the only people who received God’s personal attention during creation.

Its like Glenda the Good Witch said in The Wizard of Oz, “It was there inside of you all along.” God’s perfection of me has been here, inside me, all along. I just needed to open my eyes and take note of it.

At the beginning, my beginning, God thought of me, the person He wanted me to be and what things I would need to fulfill my destiny. He took all of those thoughts and breathed them into me. He created me.

Even though I am human and I make mistakes, say things I shouldn’t, think things I shouldn’t God sees me as He created me. Perfect. He knows what I am made of, what I am capable of. He formed me piece by piece and that is marvellous.

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