Today’s reflection comes from Michelle Little. Michelle is the director of summer programs, overseeing everything happening in the summer at Mini-Yo-We.
Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 2.
For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
-1 Corinthians 2:11-16
Our culture revels in the celebration of the self. Self-help. Self-improvement. Self-sufficiency.
We constantly search for answers to introspective questions:
Who am I? What am I? What am I good at? Am I successful? Am I loved?
We seek after and spur each other on towards developing a strong self-image. We campaign to each other to love ourselves: “You are beautiful, you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.”
(And we are. And we do.)
But, when I consider myself through the lens of the world, I start to tally and check all that I am. I try to answer those questions about how I live, and what I think; about how I look, and what I have achieved; and I come up short. Every time. As I look into myself – just myself – with honest eyes, I see the darkness of who I really am. I see through the facade that I present to other people, and I see the brokenness that is in such desperate need of healing.
My self-image crumbles.
And then…
I consider myself through the eyes of my Lord; I trade in my self-image for my Christ-image, and I see myself through the eyes of the one who has called me to Himself and said take up your cross. To the one who has invited me not to revel in myself, but to lose myself, and to be found in Him. To deny myself, to make myself less, to decrease and diminish and let all that I am fall away until nothing is left except for who He is, and who I am in Him.
And this is where I am found – in losing myself – in losing my desires, my goals, my plans, the lesser loves of my heart. In the fullness of taking up my cross and following Him, through death and into glorious resurrection, it is here where I am found.
My self-image, replaced by my Christ-image; this broken, clambering, cross-bearer – reflecting the one who has called me.
“All that I am for all that you are.”
With love,
Michelle
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