‘You weren’t born to be anything you want; you were born to be something quite specific.’
—Martin Shaw, Smokehole
Somewhere along the way I was taught that freedom meant becoming anything I wanted. Build yourself. Reinvent yourself. Curate yourself. Keep every door open until life itself becomes one long hallway of mirrors.
But God has been teaching me something altogether different.
I was never meant to become anything.
I was meant to become someone.
There is a difference.
An acorn is not free to become a whale. A river is not diminished because it cannot become a mountain. Everything in creation has a nature, a calling written into it before it ever draws its first breath. Only modern man believes meaning is manufactured instead of discovered.
For years I mistook my wounds for my identity. I thought survival was my personality. I believed my fears were simply “who I am.” Trauma has a way of convincing you that your scars are your design.
But God does not consult our wounds when He names us.
He calls us by something older.
Something truer.
Scripture says He knew me before He formed me in my mother’s womb. Before there was pain. Before there was shame. Before anyone spoke words over me that did not belong. My life was not an accident waiting to invent itself. It was a masterpiece waiting to be uncovered beneath the rubble. Just like you.
This is why following Christ often feels less like becoming someone new and more like coming home.
He peels away the false self layer by layer. The striving. The addictions. The endless performances. The masks built to survive a world that did not love well. Each surrender feels like a death until suddenly I realize it was only the shell dying. The person God imagined from the beginning was breathing underneath all along.
The world tells me to look inward and create myself.
Christ tells me to look upward and receive myself.
One path leaves me exhausted because I can never finish the project.
The other leaves me grateful because the Architect never lost the blueprint.
Perhaps I was never born to be anything I wanted.
Perhaps I was born to become exactly the woman God dreamed of before the foundations of the world. And that calling is infinitely more beautiful than anything I could have invented for myself.
B🤍
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