Confession
I want to be completely honest with you. Whether you’ve known me my whole life or just a few months, there’s something you need to know. For those that have known me for years, this may be hard to swallow or to understand. It will be weird or difficult especially for those who don’t get to see me too often. I don’t confess this lightly. There are several factors at play in what I’m going to tell you, one in particular we will discuss and it is primarily the reason that I am writing this. Well, other than, you know, me confessing this to you.
Before we go any further and get to my confession, I want to let you in on the beginning of my journey. When I began my journey with Christ (at 15 years old), I would say that I was a bit like Gideon with a whole lot of Peter. What I mean by that is that I was completely insecure in who I was and in my giftings, yet at the same time I was completely okay with just throwing myself out there and sticking my foot in my mouth. I hadn’t fully grasped the whole brain to mouth filter thing. Those closest to me got to see this, weird combination of personality traits on full display. To those on the outside, or passerby’s, I most likely just seemed unaware and reckless. I wasn’t carrying myself like the follower of Christ that I was constantly proclaiming to be. This carried much into my adult life, honestly, until almost recently.
So here is my confession. I am not the 10 year old little boy you knew. I am not the impulsive (some, probably most, would also call idiotic) 20 year old that you knew. And honestly, I am not even the same person I was just a year ago. I AM NOT WHO I USED TO BE. Now, you all are most likely thinking, what a weird confession, and I’ve just wasted 3 minutes of my life. Well, hear me out to the end. Because I have another confession. There’s more.
By the grace of God, I am not who I used to be!
Just about 15 months ago I was in the darkest spot I had ever been in spiritually in my whole life. There was still fresh heartbreak with a church I was pastoring at previously. It was then that so many things (spiritually speaking) seemed to surface all at once. It hit me like I had run full speed in a wall. I didn’t know how to recover. I felt farther from God than I had ever been. So here is my other confession. For most of my life I had been mostly closed off to the Holy Spirit working in my life. This wasn’t intentional, it was just a result of my preconceived notions of how God was supposed to work and how the Holy Spirit was supposed to operate. I felt that the Holy Spirit was supposed to work within the limits that I had unintentionally set.
But by the grace of God, I am not who I used to be. I am not who I used to be because I serve a God who has been patient with me. There are things about my journey that I would like not to have gone through, but they are important to my journey because God has allowed me to go through them so He could use them in the process of transforming me into who He created me to be.
Over the past year, God has used a handful of men to speak encouragement and wisdom in my life and affirm several things to me. Because I swallowed my pride and finally allowed others to speak into my life, this also opened me up to seeing the Spirit move in my life in so many ways that I had never experienced before. What an amazing thing it is to see and feel God moving. God has used these men to affirm my giftings and where God has called me. Because of these men, I can be more confident in who God created me to be, to lead who God has designed me to lead, and to be confident in the man God was working on me to become. I find refuge in knowing how God worked through the unlikely hero Gideon to deliver his people. Seeing how Jesus restored Peter even after his many failings I can now see more clearly God moving in my life and where He is leading, even though I’m still weird and at times reckless.
Who are you allowing to speak words of wisdom and affirmation into your life?
