Hello everyone. It’s been a while since I’ve had the time and motivation to write to you here, but today, I wanted to share something that happened to me a few years ago now. It’s another part of my testimony, and after pondering it yet again today, I feel I should share it with you all here. Today, I will share to you the revelation that God granted me about how He sees me.
Some Needed Background
You may be wondering, “How God sees you? Don’t you just read the Bible and know from what He says in there?” Well, while you are right that we should certainly learn from His word how He thinks of each and every one of us, I am speaking about a personal revelation that He granted me during a weekend the first Keryx community woman’s weekend I ever attended.
As you may surmise from my past articles, I have had self-confidence issues all of my life. From growing up being bullied to no end by others, and from myself, to looking at most all other women and seeing how I am different than they are, my comfort in my own skin has never been great. Even now, I am still learning to accept and feel comfortable in this body that God has blessed me with, and it can still be a challenge at times, especially when I lose focus on the revelation God gave me.
“(5) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;”
2 Corinthians 10:5
For anyone who might not know, which is likely most all of my new friends, unless they attended the last Keryx weekend where I spoke for the first time; I have an issue with body hair. Even when I was a small child, I had hairy arms and back. My genetics I guess, just have a bunch of hairy people all getting together making more hairy people… but I digress.
Because of this body hair issue, I can remember as far back as first grade, and even a little into kindergarten, being teased for being different. Of course, the older I got, the more body hair I gained, and the worse the bullying became. Even after beginning to shave my arms and legs to “fit in”, the bullies would simply make fun of me for trying to get rid of the problem.
At any rate, because of this issue, I have always thought less of myself and how I appear before others. It is also why, more often than not, I wear long sleeve shirts and leggings throughout the entire year, including on the hottest of summer days. I have begun to stop shaving my arms at least, in an attempt to get used to seeing the hair there to attempt to accept it. And my new sisters in Christ have all been wonderful in helping me to know that it doesn’t matter to them nor to my husband, and to let it go for myself.
“(11) Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as also ye do.”
1 Thessalonians 5:11
So I definitely want to thank them for that. And I want to thank God for putting them in my life, to encourage me and to help heal my broken heart about this issue.
The Revelation
Now that some of the backstory for the necessity of this revelation has been given, I will tell you about the revelation itself. The revelation is about how God sees me, as I mentioned in the introduction. And it was given to me at my first ever Keryx woman’s weekend I ever attended, shortly after God had delivered me from my depression.
I was attending the weekend, for the first time ever, and it’s from Thursday until Sunday. Well, on Friday, they had talked a lot about our worth in Christ. And at some point, one of the speakers had asked if we knew how God saw us. To me, this was a revolutionary question! “How does God see me? I have no idea!” By this point, I had gone through a lot of how other people had seen me, and I knew quite well how I saw myself. And while approaching these two subjects honestly had helped quite a bit, I had not thought to ask myself how God saw me.
So that night, in bed, in the communal sleeping area, to the sounds of other women blissfully snoring away, I prayed to God earnestly to show me and to tell me what He thought of me. It went something like this: “God, you know I am hardheaded and I am not good at reading subtle signs. And I am sorry for not asking this sooner, but how do you see me? Can you please tell me in a way that I absolutely cannot miss or mistake? Cause now that this question is here, I must know.” It continued like that until I fell asleep myself.
“(7) Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:”
Matthew 7:7
The next day, during one of the worship portions of the day, while we were all singing our hearts out to God, a women appeared, seemingly out of no where, before me. And I was in the front of the room, to the far right side, with the speakers from the musicians blasting me directly. This woman, had been seated on the other side of the room, and yet I didn’t see her come over to me at all. She just simply was before me.
She then grasped my face gently, and all faded away. The music, the people, the room, everything. Only her face was visible to me. If you’ve ever seen the Matrix movies, that slow-mo stuff they do, that’s kinda what happened when everything faded away. I can’t explain it otherwise. But anyhow, all I could see was her face.
And inside my soul, when she spoke to me, I knew it wasn’t her speaking to me, but rather God speaking to me through her. Slowly, she said, “I love you. You are smart. You are funny. You are beautiful. I love you.” So so slowly, and so pointedly. When she began with the first “I love you”, I began bawling and the tears would not stop coming. I told her I loved her too, and she hugged me and left. When the hug broke, is when everything came suddenly rushing back into my world. The music, the women smiling and singing to the Lord, everything. And I was changed then.
“(7) Do ye look on things after the outward appearance? If any man trust to himself that he is Christ’s, let him of himself think this again, that, as he is Christ’s, even so are we Christ’s.”
2 Corinthians 10:7
That following Sunday (the next day), we had a receiving line where we all hugged one another and talked a bit before going back into the world. When I got to her, I was able to tell her thank you, and that God had used her to answer my prayer from Friday night. She was shocked, and grateful to know that He used her to answer a prayer for me. She even said, “Oh, so that’s why you were crying so much!”
In Closing
So that’s the story of how I received revelation from God about how He sees me. And this revelation is one that I have to cling to, because otherwise the old judgments from myself and others start to cloud my mind. The ones that said, “you’re not worthy”, “you’re ugly”, “no one likes you”, “they’re all just lying to you to make you feel good before they tell you what they really think of you”, etc.
Now, I must tell myself, “Even if any of that is true, God, the One who made me, loves me. He thinks I’m smart. He thinks I’m funny. And He thinks I’m beautiful.” And for me, that has to be enough. And I know that the closer I get to God, and the more I seek Him, the more that that will be enough.
We are all in a constant battles with ourselves as our strongest opponent, because Satan uses ourselves to bring us down and to keep us from Jesus. You are certainly not alone in judging yourself harshly, nor in your suffering. Jesus is with you, holding you when you cannot hold yourself together. He is cheering with you on your best days and eagerly reaching out to you on your worst of days. Take heart and trust in the Lord.
“(33) These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33
And to be honest, I am writing this to myself just as much as I am to you dear reader. God blessed me with having too much body hair. What it has done is allowed Satan to test me to the utmost, in trying to keep me from God, but, it has also allowed me to have a testimony to share with women all over the world that may help them too, be delivered from Satan’s grasp.
There are days when I don’t feel it is a blessing, but I know if continue to hold fast onto the revelation that God bestowed upon me that day, that I will overcome this challenge, and it will become one of my greatest weapons against the enemy.
Keep fighting my sisters & brothers in Christ! We have a God who fights for us, who died for us, and who still lives for us eagerly awaiting the day we can be reunited with Him. Keep lifting each other up, so we can keep Satan under our heels.
God Bless you and keep you!
♥ Jess ♥
