VERSE:

Ephesians 2:13-15 “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”

THOUGHTS:

Anxiety snuck up on me.

I didn’t even know I struggled with anxiety until my therapist pointed it out to me, a couple of years ago. I believed I had just become really good at always being prepared. I spent years of my life obsessively playing and replaying scenarios. I lived my life in constant fear and I could be completely deflated by any sort of interaction gone wrong. There was so much energy wasted worrying about the unlikely hypotheticals. I hadn’t been living.

In my life one of the biggest things that have effected my anxiety is my sense of worth. It can be as simple as a day I am feeling down or it can be as complicated as issues related to my own self-worth. No matter how much God’s love for me and my value in Him had been preached, spoken, or even prayed about, it was hard to feel worthy of the things He has done for me.

For years I had not felt worthy of His love. I couldn’t trust that the things He had for me were good and it kept perpetuating this endless cycle of anxiety and lack of self-worth. All the anxiety I kept feeling always circled back to the way I felt about myself and the ways I viewed God. I was raised in a Christian home and I knew all the rhetoric about the love of God. It all felt empty.

But, if you don’t understand God’s love and pursuit of you, how can you live fully in His rest?

Graham Cooke says in his book series, Letters from God, “Beloved, I do not see anything wrong with you! I only see what is missing from your experience of Me, and I am totally committed to giving you that encounter and experience.” I love what Cooke says because that message can help us keep our perspective clean and really precise. God is already working on our behalf. I think trying to overcome anxiety without asking God to change the way we see ourselves in Him can be a fruitless cycle.

In Ephesians 2:13-15 it says, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. “

Jesus, himself, connects us to His peace by the sacrifice He made for us. There are no dividing lines, but we are one with Jesus and HE IS PEACE.

I grew fed up with the endless cycle of anxiety. My heart cried out from the depths and I asked God to change me. God answered, but not in a one-time answer to my prayer. It was a slow, intentional process of getting into places where I didn’t know I needed Him. God was working on changing the way I saw myself, but also He was changing the way I saw Him. I started looking at myself through His perspective, and I really began seeing myself. I starting learning about the character and nature of God. I began truly understanding His loving kindness towards me, as an individual.

Cooke talks about stepping into a perspective of peace. I think that it can be as simple as asking God to help realign you to His perspective. I believe that when we ask God to help us on this journey, He always delivers. The journey that God takes us on, is always a good one.

PRAYER:

Thank you that you are a God of peace. Thank you that you are always at work in our lives connecting and realigning us to who you really are. Thank you for all you are doing in our hearts and that you are continually at work reconnecting us to who you made us to be. Amen.