Blessing or Curse Is a perspective

​The world begs me to become something. Often, I feel that call to be something as a call to be something that looks like success.

Educated. Wealthy. Handsome. Youthful. Athletic. Smiling.

Whole.

When I'm constantly responding to the call to be something, and hard times and suffering come along, suffering at the hands of things that happen to me or things I've created for me, they often feel like enemies of my chance to be something.

They attack my looks or my bank account or my worldly status. And pretty soon, I'm living in a constant state of panic, just sure that any minute now the world is going to discover I am no longer something.

What I have been through has surely rendered me insignificant; those are the thoughts of someone called to be something.

I lived a lot of my life with those thoughts. I lived a lot of my life wrestling with them and hiding from them and drowning them. Because being called to be something is a call no one can ever fully answer; every inevitable hardship feels like a threat to that call.

It can begin to feel like a life sentence in many ways.

I don't have many of those thoughts these days. They try to visit, for sure. But they are no longer welcome here.

Because today I have zero desire to become something in this world. My heart is completely bent on being some ONE. Someone I can live with on the inside no matter what the world, or even me at times, thinks of the man on the outside.

I want to be someone who truly embraces the spirit of the Jesus who lives inside me. The Jesus of strength and compassion and knowledge and empathy and healing and wise counsel.

And here is the thing about longing to be someone. When hard times come along, they are never a threat to that longing, they are what produces it.

Hard times make us stronger. They make us more compassionate. They position us to better understand others and equip us to be healers we could never be without that understanding.

Steven Furtick says, "some of the things you have been through in your life, if your value were external you'd be ruined. But if your value is internal, those things reveal you."

I think too many of us are going through life battling to be noticed in a world where it's easier than ever for everyone to get noticed. Which in the end, ironically, probably leaves more people than ever feeling unnoticed.

I no longer care much about being noticed. I want to be revealed. Revealed is an inside out exposure of me to the world and not an outside in interpretation of how I think the world might see me.

I don't love going through hard times. I don't. But I no longer feel hard times or suffering as a threat to my identity. In fact, I accept them as a chance to reveal it. To build my identity closer to the identity of the some ONE I long to become.

Blessed or cursed is a perspective. For most of my life I felt cursed in many ways. Today, I look back on that whole life, all of it, every single thing that happened and every single thing I did, as a blessing.

A gift.

A gift that has revealed me to be someone I could have never become without the gift.

A gift that has made me some one I will never again trade in for the chance to be some thing.

Because in the end, maybe making that trade is the greatest curse of all.