Have you ever felt like God is always scratching at the same spot? You know, the spot you thought that was something that you have already worked through, that everything was done and you were healed. Then God comes along and just starts scratching, saying “hey this thing you thought you were done with, we’re not done with it yet.” That has been God with me the past several weeks. It wasn’t until today that I started to understand what it is that God is trying to say.

Joshua 1:9 talks about being strong and courageous, because God is with you. This was a verse that really spoke to me, because I feel like it is easy to be strong and courageous when I am acting for someone else, when it comes to acting on God’s behalf, or even the behalf of others. Yet, when it comes to anything regarding my own life, I am anything but strong and courageous. I hide myself, being only that which I need to be and nothing more, making it hard for me to show my true self, let alone know what my true self looks like. I live in constant fear that if I was to be completely known then I will be rejected, hated, and even may lose the ones that I love. It is in this ways that I am not courageous, yet it makes me think that maybe I am not alone in this.

Maybe many of us feel the same way. We live in this constant fear of being completely seen by others. We are okay with being seen by God, after all we believe in God’s love and mercy, but that of other humans is unknown. We have seen it time and time again, other people tend to show us less love and mercy then God. We have come to see love as conditional and mercy is just the same. So we live our lives afraid to show other who we are, because we are afraid of how they may act. Yet God wants us completely, so how are we to do the work of God, if we cannot even be the person that God wants us to be.

~ Pastor Jillian