After an interesting personal week wherein I found myself talking about a painful incident from my childhood, I heard Pastor Blake use words on Sunday that spoke directly to me. He challenged us in the beginning to recall if we could remember an experience when the powerful words of an adult had spoken something into us. These words could have caused fear, anxiety and confusion. As he continued to speak, he said “When someone spoke something over you that has impacted us our entire lives...no matter how successful we are” I found myself nodding my head because those words spoken over me as a child, at now 36, still resound in my mind like an earthquake through my soul. You see, at that age I sang, “Jesus loves me this I know…” but I didn’t really know. I didn’t really know who I was as a child of God and I don’t believe I actually came into that until my mid twenties.

As we age and experience more life we sometimes find ourselves still burying down the harsh or misguiding words of adults from our childhood rather than uncovering the truth in the word of God. As I was gently and then emphatically reminded last Sunday, I am a child of God, and I am also a co-heir with Christ. How cool is that? I often forget that part, because I’ve always felt much more “less than” with Christ, like somehow I was deserving of the love of God but not the sacrifice of Christ. It’s weird, right? We really can get stuck in our heads with the words of our youth and forget that we are worthy of receiving Christ’s love as he wants us to have it. We think that the words that were spoken over us define us and make us stained. Maybe we have walked in and acted out of shame for years and we believe that we are somehow unworthy of asking to feel that love, or (even) of opening the line of communication up with God at all. Pastor Blake reminds us of this simple and powerful truth, “Do not let suffering rob and convince you that you have been disinherited.” I meditated on that sentence later that day and just now as I am writing. I am calmed in knowing that the love of God through Jesus Christ can not be denied to us based on suffering our past, it is there to give us a hopeful future.