For when I don't realize His Words are for me...

Sometimes when I sit down to write a post, words entirely different than those I envisioned appear on the screen. Usually I read through it, scratch me head, wonder where that came from and hit 'Save' instead of 'Publish'.

Sometimes I quietly accept that God will give me words I didn't intend to say because it needs to be heard. I do my best to simply post it and pray that the words reach whoever they're meant to reach.

And sometimes I fail to realize that sometimes God gives me those words because they're meant for me.  Apparently yesterday, I needed a reminder.

Yesterday was a No-Good-Horrible-Day kind of day.  I should have seen it coming, but I didn't.  I cried the whole way home from work.  You know the cry I'm talking about: The Ugly Cry.  The one where your face puffs up to eight times its regular size, your skin turns red and blotchy and your eyes and nose overflow with their particular fluids.

Don't look at me like you don't know what I'm talking about.  I know you do.

It was too much.  The day at work, the pressure I put on myself, my attempt to be strong and unemotional... it was all too much.  Everything piled up into a massive burden of impossible and landed squarely on the camel's back.

Where it promptly exploded.

There is not enough Kleenex in the world when that happens.  I'm just saying...

Poor Len wasn't prepared for what he got when I came home.
Neither was I, really.

God was.

That shouldn't surprise me and yet it does.  Repeatedly.  As I sat there yesterday, the mess of my heart - all the regret, frustration, shame and grief - melded into a single thought:

I'm not enough.

All my efforts to be better - more kind, more honest, more hard working, more sincere, more loving, a better friend, sister, wife, employee, more forgiving, more thankful, more trusting, more everything - were all erupting into a gooey, botched heap of not enough.

Are your standards higher than Mine?

They were words for me.  Words for my tortured heart.

I keep messing it up, Lord.

The slate is clean.

I'm not enough, Abba.

I have loved you with an everlasting love. 

I don't know who I'm supposed to be, Father.

You are mine.

And as I knelt in my living room last night with my grubby, tear-stained face mashed into a pillow His Word thudded through to my heart and soul as it always does; a gentle, overflowing river of hope and love to quiet and restore my soul.

"But now, this is what the LORD says—

he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine." ~ Isaiah 43:1

Created.
Redeemed.
Called by name.

His.