I am SO excited to welcome my first guest blogger today: Mya Parker!
It is no coincidence that she shares a name with our daughter Mya – she is her namesake! While I didn’t know Mya terribly well at the time we chose the name, I knew her well enough to know I liked her name (and I loved her hair…) and that her joy and love for the Lord would be exactly what I would want my daughter to possess. In the past seven years, I have watched her grow in her passion and love for the Lord. Her joy, smile and passion are contagious. Her commitment to sharing God’s truth has led her to recently launch a career as a speaker and writer.
She is a veteran, a homeschooling, crossfitting momma of 3 (with one on the way) and a wife to her husband, Nate. She makes this whole mothering thing look effortless as she does it from a place of rest and reliance on the Lord.
I know you will enjoy her encouragement today!
Bloom
Imagine…
I heard the Lord whisper to my heart as I took in all the beauty of this tropical pool-side bistro, espresso in hand. Being without at least one child on my hip or in my hand for the first time in over a year allowed me to begin my first mission trip with eyes wide open and heart even wider. I couldn’t stop gazing, inspecting even, the South American flowers in the surrounding garden. It felt like I was seeing flowers for the first time. The diversity of colors! The symphony of fragrance! The intricacy of each individual design. I would lean into one and tenderly cup it in my hand, all but tasting its petals. Lord, look what you’ve made! I marveled at His creativity. Backing away and seeing the array of each plant and how its individual design magnified the beauty of another nearly brought me to tears. Clearly a Holy Spirit moment of monumental counseling about to go down…people just don’t get this excited about flowers. Well, maybe some people…but certainly not me. Until now.
Imagine. His gentle power cut through my botanical feast.
Imagine if a sunflower spent its whole life and all its energy trying to make itself a rose.
The Lord clearly needed to use every day North American flowers to make His point with this brown thumb. I let my imagination go there and I nearly laughed at the absurdity of the thought. A sunflower sweating and groaning and grunting and toiling with absolutely no change to its design, exasperated and hopeless at its efforts. Its head hung low in shame and despair as it looked longingly at the rose. My near laughter turned to hot tears.
Oh my goodness, Lord. Lord! This is me. This is what I’ve done. Whoa. I had no idea. I had no idea. This has been me. This is all of us…
He continued with such empathetic compassion. Mya, what would the world look like if everyone simply bloomed as they were planted?
The vision of wild, fully confident, unique creations – eight billion of us! – came rushing in and the possibility of such a magnificent world took my breath away. The Lord planted something deep in the soil of my heart that balmy, Bolivian morning and has spent the last two and a half years pruning the garden around and the garden within – rooting out lies of who I thought I was, who I thought I wanted to be, how I viewed others – and began planting mighty seeds of truth in desperate, ready soil. I have, indeed, begun to bloom as I was planted by Him and it has revolutionized the way I look in the mirror, the way I look into His eyes, how I mother, how I love my husband, how I see you, how I view the future. Praise You, Jesus, for that world-stopping garden moment to bring me back to The Garden where it all began!
As we go back to the very beginning of creation to understand our unique design, we cannot ignore the fact that it all began in a garden – The Garden. God could have chosen any environment in which to dwell with His first-born children and He designed a place rich with life, teeming with boundless diversity of vegetation and wildlife. He could have chosen to introduce Himself as anything since He is everything and He chose Creator. In the core of His design, our Heavenly Father IS Creator and He is limitless as such – He can make literally anything, anyone, anywhere, with simply a word.
We read in Genesis chapter one that The Trinity made us, you and me, in Their image – in Their very likeness. Being that God is perfect and is infinite in both His identity and His ability, it is only right to conclude that He had limitless access to His infinite creation warehouse when He had us in mind. I imagine Him leaning over a drafting board in the Heavens, a huge smile on His face, with a pen in one hand and ink wells of every color and matter at His reach. One-by-one, and with only one in mind at a time, He looks up and lets His boundless imagination take Him away as He dreams and drafts out the design for each of His children. From the way we look to how we laugh to what we love and what awakens us to the good works only we can carry out on this planet (Ephesians 2:10). And as He completes each dream-design, He births it to eternal life with just a breath and a deep, belly laugh dances it into existence on wings of never-ending love.
In Psalm 139, we worship “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.”
I’m not sure where it all came from, but I spent most of my born-again life, after I received Jesus, with the unspoken belief that I had to remain in my impoverished, desperate state where I first met Him. I believed that my bowing low at the foot of the Cross and receiving grace there set me alive for eternity’s sake, but fear and a false sense of humility kept me on my face and mostly dead and powerless here on earth. One of the first things God said to me as I began escaping with Him weekly to “learn who He actually designed me to be” was, First we need to start with who I really am and what you have wrongly believed about me. Wow. Yes! He led me to places like 1 Peter chapter five where it teaches to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt us and John chapter 14 that whoever believes in Jesus will do the works He had been doing, and will do even greater things than these, because He was going to the Father. As I just spent uninterrupted time with Him and openly asked Him to reveal who He actually is and how He designed me, He showed me over and over again through the Bible and with words straight into my core how much He moved Heaven and Earth to save me from all manners of death – eternal, yes, but also every bit of death and darkness here – because He really loves me. He REALLY loves me! He REALLY loves you! John 3:16 doesn’t say that “God was so obligated to save the world that he gave his one and only son…”, or “God so loved the perfected, eternal-life version of all his wayward, haggard, disgusting children that he sent his one and only son…”. It says, and take a minute to let this sink in, “God SO LOVED the world that he gave his one and only Son…God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” And His heart is further revealed in Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his only Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” He really loves us. Like, really, really! And because He personally chose our each intricate detail in that Heavenly design studio before the creation of the world, I think it’s safe to say He really likes us, too.
When Jesus went to be with the Father after His resurrection, He left us with the Great Commission – to go and make disciples of all the nations. And then in 1 Corinthians 12, we are told that we are actually the Body of Christ – each with its individual, indispensable part. This isn’t just a cool metaphor, this is reality. I know it’s a shocking revelation, but Jesus isn’t walking around in flesh and blood anymore. When He ascended, we were given the highest honor and greatest responsibility of being His literal body as God lives in us by the power of the Holy Spirit. We have been saved, redeemed, commissioned, and empowered to love our desperate world as Jesus in flesh and blood and each of us were individually designed by Papa God to be the hands, feet, mouth required to administer an aspect of His love that only we can. We have sunflower missions that cannot – no matter the amount of futile effort exerted – be carried out by roses. It’s almost as if there’s an enemy of God so bent on not seeing the fullness of His glory actualized that he gives us cultural rose-colored glasses through which to distort our reflection and diffuse our unique effectiveness with comparison before we even leave the bathroom mirror. We are on to you, wicked one!
Jesus unrolls a scroll of Isaiah 61 in Luke chapter 4 and announces His fulfillment of the prophecy to preach good news to the poor and bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to bestow a crown of beauty instead of ashes. He goes on to call us, the redeemed ones, oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor. In John 17:22, Jesus says “I have given them (us) the glory that you (God) gave me.” From before the foundations of the Earth, God purposed us to display His likeness and behold His glory as we continue to walk with Him in the Garden in the cool of the day. There was a major hiccup, to put it lightly, when sin entered the picture, but then the remedy was sent in Jesus and that original purpose remains.
Jesus, the Way, made the way to the Father through the sacrifice of His life, and now we are promised in John 15 that if we remain in Him, the True Vine, we will produce MUCH fruit and His joy will be made complete in us. The original purpose of uniquely displaying the splendor of our Creator, as only we can, has never changed and the way for that to be actualized, on Earth as it is in Heaven, has remained the same – relationship with the Father.
It sounds almost too simple to be true, but it truly is that simple. So, I implore you, sister! We need you! You need you! Begin as I began a couple life-changing years ago, journal and Bible open, with the simple questions “who are You, really?” and “who did you create me to be, specifically, before this crazy world got ahold of me?” There is really nothing sweeter or more intimately joyful than looking into my children’s eyes and telling them who they are. Like our good and perfect Daddy, He can’t wait to answer you and take you back to that original, beautiful design that the world is so desperate to see and know and through whom to uniquely receive His love. May you ever see your actual reflection in His gaze alone and receive it fully, as He receives you fully, dear one.
On your journey to blooming as you were planted, you might find yourself wanting more resources to assist. The following sisters and brothers have ministered to me deeply through their writing, teaching, and musical worship: Abi Stumvoll, Lisa Bevere, Dan Mohler, Todd White, Kris Vallotton, Bill Johnson, Steffany Gretzinger, Amanda Cook and Jonathan David and Melissa Helser.
One of the most powerful and life altering questions I ever asked of G-d was, “show me myself.” He did and continues to do so. I am eternally grateful for His grace, His patience and His wisdom is cultivating the seeds that were planted in me long ago…I am eternally grateful for the garden in which He had called me to bloom.
Amen! Me too!! Thank you for your love and for sharing – you have and continue to bloom into a mighty oak of righteousness.
~Mya