I am my Father's child

So it began almost 32 years ago. A young girl born to her married yet single parent. Rejected already in her mother's womb, the effects of that she would only begin to really experience in her late twenties. She carried around the labels of rejected one, abandoned one, unwanted one, not enough one, cowering constantly under the shame. Fear consumed her life, too afraid to do anything wrong, to do anything that no one approved of for fear of them too rejecting her and walking out on her. See she craved and worked hard to receive and maintain the approval of others, this fed her, it sustained her, it was the very reason she was breathing, living. The mere thought of losing this would cause her to tailspin in a whirlwind of depression that at best if she woke up the following morning she had indeed survived. 

Until one day she encountered the grace and mercy filled loved of One who saw every fear, who knew her pain, who knew her shame, who knew her. As she, sometimes not really wanting to, through the sometimes unbearable pain, lay herself down on the operating table of His love for Him to deconstruct and reconstruct her identity, she began to see herself through His eyes, as one who is loved deeply, as wanted, as accepted, as enough, as one who can be, that her identity lay not in her doing but simply in her being. Freedom. Often she stumbles, trips and falls over herself, over the things that others say about her, over the lies that still try to present themselves as truths, but now she walks with an assurance that in the thick of it all, she has been, is and will always be her Father's child.