I have a friend who once received a $50 bill as change at a store. After leaving and looking at it, he suspected that the bill might be counterfeit. He went to the bank with the expectation that if it were counterfeit, the teller would exchange it for a real bill. Once the bill was examined, the teller determined that it really was a counterfeit piece of money. She thanked him for his integrity in coming in and offered him a friendly goodbye. He received no real bill in exchange for that which was fake. Apart from this being a great disappointment
Today marks my 5th official day living in Gainesville, GA. This morning before work began, the staff had a really wonderful time of worship and prayer together. In that time, God used some of my new coworkers and friends to teach me something very powerful. For any of you who actually know me, you probably know that I am a very strong, determined girl. Often, I struggle with feeling like that part of me is bad; I sometimes fear that if I am me, the only thing that can happen is that people will inevitably get hurt. So, in effort to deal with this, I tend to control…well…everything. (*note: This isn’t intended to be Shaye’s confessional hour. However, explaining these things leads me to a really important point.)
If there has been any theme of the lessons I’ve been learning in the last week of my life, it is that God has created me uniquely and purposefully. But whenever I function apart from Christ, I end up living as a counterfeit version of the real me. I cannot tell you, my reader, how much I long to be set free from living with the counterfeit version of myself and living in the freedom that comes with discovering what it means to be the real me. This morning, I made a commitment. I will choose to learn today to discover who I am. I will choose to put to death the counterfeit me.
