Skip to main content

Not about "jeans," but "genes."


Well, it's been a Leigh-vs.-the-inbox kinda week. The bright side of that is the fact that God is preparing to do some really huge things: Passion 2012 and launching a morning gathering at passion city church. I'm honestly really excited when I think about those two things... and I'm extremely humbled that He allows me to play a tiny role in them. Focusing on those two end results and the literal Kingdom impacts that will result helps me stop growling at my inbox. :-)

Anyway, that's not what I logged on to say.

Had a thought this evening about confidence and identity. Something I have struggled with in the last year is feeling free to be who I really am and letting go of self-consciousness. Tonight God helped me draw a connection between identity and John 3:30: "He must increase; I must become less."

If we will just stop TRYING so hard to BE anything in particular and instead direct that energy toward being sensitive to the Holy Spirit, we will be who we were created to be. Icing on the cake? Confidence will follow, a real confidence - not the kind that comes from a good pair of jeans, but the kind that comes from knowing we come from good GENES (our dad is a King - ha! Sorry for the corny pun.).

I wish I could go back and take the hours I spent worrying about my image - replaying conversations I had with people, analyzing their thoughts of me, etc. - and change those into hours of prayer and solitude before God, asking Him to help me stay in step with the Spirit and listen to His promptings. Asking him to take away the flurry of thoughts about myself and instead help me be a bringer of light and a carrier of the Name.

As the cliche says, hindsight is 20/20 of course, but I hope that when my next self-reflective thought comes through my mind, I can speak John 3:30 and remember whose daughter I am. This will help me act and become more like the person I'm longing to reflect: not Leigh, Jesus.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Olivia Kate Update

We expected a routine appointment. Last April, the cardiology team told us that we did not have to return for another check-up on the hole in Olivia's heart for a full year. This was music to a mom's and dad's ears! Since her pediatrician had noticed the severe murmur in her heartbeat when she was just four days old, we'd visited the cardiologist office several times to monitor any changes in heart function. So far, it seemed that this hole was not causing any problems, and the doctors said that it might even close on its own. The ultrasounds of Olivia's heart today revealed a different story, unfortunately. The left side of her heart has enlarged slightly over the last year, which tells us that this precious organ is under a bit of stress due to the turbulence of the extra blood flowing in and out of the hole. The first cardiologist who reviewed the ultrasounds with us today told us what we really did not want to hear: Olivia is heading down the path that req...
10 comments
Read more

What's Real

I struggle with mental illness. Like many others, I can't really define myself as falling cleanly into one category or give myself a specific diagnosis. Mine has manifested in different ways during different seasons of my life: sometimes it's anxiety, but other times it's depression, disordered eating, obsessive compulsion or a cocktail of these. Regardless, it's there, and while I experience a lot of happiness in my life, there's also some inner turmoil that I fight to keep at bay. Why am I telling you this? It's certainly not for pity or to draw attention to myself. I'm guessing that many people reading this also struggle, but others may not. For both parties, I want to take a stab at normalizing mental illness and I also want to point out a few things I've found to be true: - Mental illness is not limited to a certain stereotype. Depression doesn't just affect teenagers who prefer dark clothes and hooded jackets! It's not just the poor, ju...
5 comments
Read more

The Naked Truth

I've struggled with body image for an undefinable amount of time. My weight has fluctuated my entire life, and once I became old enough to realize it, it became an unfortunate obsession. As I matured and opened up about this to my peers in college, I found that I was not alone. Maintaining an unhealthy relationship with food is what my husband now refers to as the "acceptable" sin among Christian women. It's the most common struggle among my female friends. Or, it's the most common one they admit to, at least. This destructive sin rears its ugly head in many ways, manifesting differently in different women. Some women develop actual eating disorders, others binge and purge, others develop a more generalized obsession with appearance and self loathing, and still others fall elsewhere in this nasty spectrum. I've been thinking a lot about this sin specifically lately, which led me to think about how the enemy confuses us about the very definition of sin. L...
5 comments
Read more