****
I am more than
the name my children call me
the ring that's on my finger
the music that fills my lungs and spills into the open spaces of my life
the books I cannot put down
the boxes I've been placed in
the sexuality I embrace
the ballot I cast
the number on the tag of my heans
the language I speak
the roots by which I've been bound
the degree bearing my name.
I am a sojourner of truth and beauty, traveling my way through this hill country, trying to see the distant land in which I will dwell forever with the author of this bigger story.
I am redeemed from the ugliness of choosing to serve my self, my own agenda, my own desires.
I am restored from the brokenness suffered, the shattered jar on the barren ground after I'd given myself away to those who could never really fill me.
I am unveiled of the dulled identities I chose to embrace and deem as truths.
I am beloved
by a redeemer, a restorer who so loved the broken, the selfish enough to trade his life, strung up on wood, so that those who dwell in the tents of this foreign land as pilgrims
could dwell, unlimited, in a glimmering city with rock-solid foundations created by a most precise architect and builder of beauty and life beyond what we imagine and know from our hill-country view.
And could I just say, beloved, the same is true of you. You are more than all of this.
