Who am I? What am I here for? Is there anything more to this life? These are all-too-common questions asked my many teen girls today. It is so easy to get stressed out by the pressures of this world to know who you are and what your purpose is. There is pressure from your parents to get good grades, drive safely, and live a good and moral lifestyle. There is pressure from your friends to hang out, call each other, act alike, and be there for everything and anything that your friends go through. There is pressure from your youth group leader to help out and be involved: be a leader! There is pressure from people you don’t even know that want you to act a certain way and even dress a certain way. Pressure, pressure, pressure!!! When you have all of these sources and more screaming in at you, it is way too easy to get down on yourself for not being confident in you. It is far too easy to conform–just be like everyone else because that is where you truly find yourself. Do not listen to that lie! You find yourself in Jesus Christ! He is the only One who can define you and love you for who you are. He created you. And He created you with a plan in mind. Aly and AJ truthfully sing “I am moving through the crowds, trying to find myself. . . and I ask myself, who do I wanna be?” These words can parallel with our own lives. We too walk around and ask “who am I?” We walk in the midst of everyone around us begging them to accept us or show us who we are. Or we try to get our identity from our friends. We mush ourselves into who our friends are, thinking that they can help us find “the real me.” The recent movie Camp Rock puts it right when they sing, “This is real, this is me. I’m exactly who I’m supposed to be. I gonna let the light shine on me.” Your life is real. You cannot change who you are. You cannot change what talents and gifts that God has blessed you with. You can’t change that. You have to embrace yourself and love who God created you to be. Period. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it! Now, is it always easy to love yourself? Nope. There are days when I struggle with who I am and what I am going to do with my future. But on those days, I have to choose to trust Jesus even more and know that He has a greater plan for my life than I could ever imagine!
O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD. You hem me in—behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 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. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you. Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
~Psalm 139