I have kept silent for long enough. Now I believe I have earned a right to speak, more so to speak about me. To think I was beginning to believe all the things you had to say about me. My God! No more will I be shaken by your piercing criticisms deliberately engineered with the malicious intent of making me feel less of myself. For I know better now. So like water off the back of a duck I now am immune from the aspersions you daily cast on my person.
Yes, I know me well enough to acquiesce with your intelligent assessment of my fault-ridden, morally bankrupt, emotionally drained and mentally inept person. Correct you are in your judgment which you passed with the sole purpose of putting and keeping me where you think I belong: with the failures, fallen-and-never-to-rise-again destitute of the earth, dependent on the magnanimity and sense of pity, yes pity rather than compassion of pious souls like thou art! Oh yes! I clap my hands and bow in awe of you, for in your inestimable wisdom, you have accurately weighed me on the scales of your own contriving, measured me by standards as defined by you, and have found me painfully wanting in all areas that matter. And with an air of finality as only one with the divine right of selective appropriation of worth can have, you have stamped me a “write off”. So with shoulders in a perpetual stoop, and a face always cast down to hide a pair of eyes afraid and ashamed to see the person in the mirror, I have trudged, nay, crawled through what at best had been a remote semblance of life, like a living dead. Every day the sun rose with its brightness, my dread rose like distasteful bile choking me from the inside out. Every night the sun sank below the horizon, I sank further in my abyss of hopelessness. For why should I feel any different when a god such as you are, had pronounced me a scum and a never-do-well.
However, yours was a first opinion, mine was a second opinion which more or less was a mirror image of yours. I would have lived ad infinitum with just these two disempowering opinions to my own continued hurt, had I not learnt of a third opinion. The opinion of someone who should know, of someone who really mattered, of someone who cared.
For he saw me not as I was but as I was made to be. He told me I am wonderfully and fearfully made, the perfection of beauty and the excellency of creation. He told me I am numbered among a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, blessed among men and highly favoured. He told me I am the light of the world, the salt of the earth, a city set upon a hill which can never be hidden. He told me I am accepted in the beloved, the apple of his eyes, his bride. He told me no iniquity has been found in me for he had taken upon himself all my sins and my guilt. He told me whatever weakness I may have is only a platform for the manifestation of his exceeding strength, for his strength is made perfect in weakness. He told me all that and more. And I believe him.
I have believed in your lies all my life, and on the basis of those lies I have lived in servitude and bondage. But now I know the truth and have been set free by it. I am glad to announce to you your words don’t count anymore. Only his does. Now I take my place among the elite of the earth, the called out ones, and I bear rule, exercising my dominion as one with royalty flowing in his veins. Who I was and who you wish I’d remain is now only a memory of a fast fading past. Who I now am is happy to see the man in the mirror and excited as the man I am becoming is daily unveiled in ever increasing shades of glory.
Oh…did I interrupt you? What were you saying about me? Well, never mind. It doesn’t matter anymore.
ovie... 