Stripped

I'm passionate about excavating the core of identity. It has just been such a major theme in my life.

As a little girl I had some trouble fitting in at school. I have memories of crying my little heart out, and writing a journal entry at age 8 that read: "my life is a bit bad. nearly no one likes me, sometimes I cry". (Written with the poor spelling of my eight-year-old self).

But I don't need or want sympathy, because I know truth, and He has healed me and set me free. What the enemy meant to harm me, God turned for good.

Nevertheless, as I grew up, I began to rely on myself to build up some protection around me so that this feeling of rejection from peers could never attack my little world again. I acted confident, I wore cool clothes, and I didn't get too close to anyone incase they discovered my deepest darkest secret... that there´s something so uniquely rejectable about me!

(This is just the explicit exposure of what I used to believe. Sometimes It´s good to spell out what we believe to see how ridiculous our beliefs can actually be.)

Do you relate? Often when I share this story, I see a few hands going up at this point.

The problems here were

1) I believed a lie: That I'm weird / something is uniquely wrong about me.

2) I had more faith in myself protecting me that in God.

3) I wasted so much energy into trying to create a (fake) presentation of me, when God had already made me a masterpiece that I refused to see!

So after years of embracing my insecurities like pets and building up my perfect facade to conceal the reality that I had any, God began to tenderly whisper truth over me. I remember in 2011 when He said "Moorea, if you spend all your life trying to fit in... at the end of your life, you may not fit anywhere." It´s that same concept from Isaiah: If you do not stand firm in your faith, then you will not stand at all. Our sense of belonging MUST come from the Father. We cannot afford to be distracted by pointless vapours in the air that are here today and gone tomorrow.

This is such an overplayed strategy from the devil. He tempted Adam and Eve by saying that if they ate the forbidden fruit, they would be "like God", when a few verses earlier, it states that God had already made them "in His image"! But if we don't know what is the truth, we are an easy target for deception. In 2016 God showed me a picture that really stuck with me. It looked like a scene from the end of a war. People were being rescued out of prison camps and there was a sense of relief in the air. Then I saw me. I was so thin, all my bones stuck out like twigs. My hair was shaved off and I looked almost dead. At this point in the vision, I began hearing what people were saying about me behind my back: "Moorea is such an amazing person!" "That Moorea has seriously impacted my life" "She has forever inspired me..." "The most beautiful woman inside and out!"... And so on.

So much applause and positive words spoken over what looked like a shriveled up rat. I seemed completely stripped down to nothing! And yet, despite what I saw, God was showing me that my value was much deeper than anything I could ever achieve, make, or express on my own.

The praises from the people were the words that He was trying to speak over me, but he knew that those words would not have hit home in that season where I was deceived into thinking that I had somehow earned greatness in my own strength. I wanted to know the Moorea that God saw, but I had to let go of my masks to find her.

My challenge is just that we take the time to look a little deeper and ask God to reveal the treasures that He has hidden within us to discover. You can be free and comfortable in your own skin, just as you are. Without needing to prove anything. Let God be your definer. You are ACCEPTED, LOVED, CHOSEN and made ON PURPOSE.