Un-becoming

Ever feel as though you're all-out battling with you and you can't see past the ugly of yourself? Ever feel as though you're fighting for a future you that you're not sure you'll ever achieve? Ever feel like the struggle is useless and you'll never change?

Yeah... me too, friend. 

A lot recently, in fact. 

Satan can rage and throw all manner of falsehoods in your beautiful face and tell you to un-believe all the truths you ever claimed and you can wonder if all you're living are lies. If all the promises of a renewed mind and a changed soul are just empty talk and you're just left to fend for yourself amid a torrent of sins and weaknesses you hate.

Some mornings, you can wake up and question whether the journey and the fight for faith in a world of fear is really worth it. You can ask yourself if you truly want to keep enduring the pains it takes to grow, to transform. If the soul-dying you're being asked to experience really will pay off in the end. 

I've found myself asking this to my own heart of late. Felt discouraged. Defeated. Self-destroying. 

Like the constant war to climb to a better freedom, a holier life is unattainable. Pointless. 

But when she said the word "un-becoming" to me in a text, suddenly everything clicked. She reminded me of the truth about who I am. The truth about how God sees me and how she saw me and how I was seeing myself was not fact. And my eyes fixed on that simple word. The un-doing. The un-learning. The un-making that precedes the re-making. 

Cycle keeps turning over and over as God untangles ruin and rebuilds into something new. Dismantling the who I was in order to turn me into who I'm intended to be is an ever-present reality. And sometimes I just get tired of the tearing apart, forgetting that, in such a process, lies my saving. Because the Hands that do the work do it in love. 

Perhaps the words of songwriter Jason Gray hold true when he said that life is like a house of rooms with each door opening to another and that we can't step into something new without leaving behind where we've been before. And maybe now I'm starting to understand how this all works... 

I must un-become hatred if I am to become love. 

I must un-become fear if I am to become faith-filled.

I must un-become anger if I am to become peace.

I must un-become lies if I am to become truth. 

I must un-become my past if I am to become my future. 

If you're not going to let what's behind you dictate your today or your tomorrow, you have to let it go and stop letting it define where you're headed. You have to walk out of that room of yesterday and into the present and turn loose of all that's been so you can embrace what's coming. You have to release the person you've been so you can become the you that God sees. You must un-become. 

Sometimes, the un-becoming is just downright scary and horrible. You see things about your life that you detest and you wish it weren't so. You stare into the mirror and you hate what you're looking at. With all your heart, you want to change and try to change and yet... the old you still comes for you and threatens to turn you away from the new you. The you that's becoming. 

It's then that you need a Voice to tell you that you're the beloved. That you belong. That you are loved. That you are forgiven. Cherished. Free. The Voice that speaks not to the you that feels it's never enough but to the you that is adopted and treasured and amazing. The Voice that says to you that it's not about you anyway but about Him and what He's done for you. 

The past can proclaim an awful lot of lies and Satan can harness those to great advantage and the moment I begin to believe them is the moment I've stopped hearing the Voice that calls me His own. And the only power I have in that moment over the many voices shouting at me is to tune into the only Voice that matters in the end. To repeat all the good things He has to say about me and to fall back into the arms of the One I call Father.

The next time you wake up and feel like giving up on you, focus on who you're becoming and realize that the un-becoming is part of it. God can't shape you into who you're meant to be unless He strips away the stuff that doesn't belong. 

The struggle is real and your old self as well as your new one are all real, too. This side of Heaven, you'll never escape the aspects of your un-becoming. It is hard and it is painful... but whoever said it wouldn't be? 

Sometimes you've got to be un-done before you can be re-made and just maybe that's what Jesus himself meant when He said that one must be born again.