Welcome to Day Nine of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”
Today’s Theme is “The Plague of Low Self-Esteem.”
The Quote for Today Is This:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

Psalm 139:13-14

We have difficulty believing that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  That’s a hard one sometimes.  We look into the mirror or our decisions, and all that we see are the numerous cracks and spidery fissures in that mirror that speak to the destruction wrought by those decisions.  We glance into the mirror of our achievements, and what stares back at us are a host of failures so numerous that the mirror is packed tight with them.  We peer into the mirror of our relationships only to have no one peering back at us.  And if we wipe the mirror clean of all of that stuff and simply glance at our own reflection, we wish that mirrors were never invented.
We don’t like ourselves a whole lot.  But what we don’t like often goes much deeper than that which any mirror can reflect back to us.  What we don’t like is how people have defined us, or how we let them do that.  We don’t like how they have projected their own issues on us.  How they blamed us for their mistakes so that they didn’t have to face them.  We are left sullen and sad by expectations that we didn’t even come close to meeting because they were designed not to be met.  And in the end, this very convincing definition of ourselves is compiled from a bunch of stuff that is far more a compilation of everyone else who had something to do with us than it was about us.
It's hard to believe that we are more than what we perceive ourselves to be.  It’s difficult to embrace the reality that we are truly made in God’s image.  That stuff doesn’t resonate.  We don’t see that in the mirror, even if we squint and lean into it.  But the greatest truths about us often don’t resonate because we have difficulty believing that we could actually be something so wonderful.
Prayer
Dear God:
Please help me to like me.  Or better yet…help me to love me.  I’m not all that certain about how to do that.  There’s a lot of self-help stuff out there and catchy ideas to help build my self-esteem.  It’s all man-made stuff that never really addresses the heart stuff.
You made me, “fearfully and wonderfully.”  You uniquely designed me.  You intentionally placed me here, at this exact time in history.  There was something very intentional in the way that You did all of that.  You have a purpose and a plan for me that is bigger than anything that I could imagine.  And that purpose and that plan is uniquely gifted to me and me alone.  That’s the truth about me. 
I confess to You that I don’t feel that way…at all.  I just can’t wrap my head around that no matter how hard I try.  All of that’s beyond me.  But I want to believe it.  I want to know that there’s something of great value sitting within me just waiting to be released.  I want to see ‘me’ how You see me, not how others have caused me to see me.  Show me who I am through Your eyes.  Help me to see my reflection in Your mirror.
I pray all of this in Jesus’s Name.  Amen.
Here’s a thought to carry with you today:
“Look in the mirror.  Go ahead and look yet again.  And look not at the reflection, for while this body of yours is marvelously complex in ways that continue to elude the reach of modern science, it is but a simple shell that holds the image of God within you.  And if the shell is that grand, how much more what God has placed inside of it.”
Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.
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Have a great day!

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