I say with confidence that who I was a year and a half ago has almost no resemblance to who I am now. I feel so dissociated from who I was, but when I look back at the old pictures and relics of the life I was living, I feel like a mother looking at her daughter. Looking at the pictures and relics instills in me a sense of joy, care and responsibility. Yet, they also give me a sense of concern, protectiveness and empathy that I can imagine one only experiences when beholding something of their own creation. It is in those moments when I catch a glimpse of how God looks at us, his creation. He regards us with such love and humility, but also grieves for our sorrows and pains. In those moments of recollecting the fragmented and supplementing person I once was, my heart breaks for what then broke his. I sit here writing this in tears, mourning the loss of the life of who I was a year and a half ago, yet my tears fall in eternal gratitude for the new life I have been given by the blood and forgiveness of Christ.  

You might be able to notice by now that I am a Christian. I often try to filter when and where I use the word “Christian” and referring to my faith in God as “religion” because I know how the Christian-identifying body looks to people who are outside of it. The Bible discusses that Jesus is the head of the body of Christ, which is The Church, or rather individuals who follow him. As we recognize people by their faces, it was meant that people would look at the church and immediately recognize it as beautiful and holy. Unfortunately, Jesus is no longer the face of many churches today, the church leaders are. Church goers often exalt these leaders, who are not all-powerful and are not perfect, “above the Lord”. Because these leaders are imperfect and so many, but not all, today are corrupt-minded and immoral in several facets, the face of modern Christianity is rather ugly to look at. This is a primary reason why many people who look at Christianity for how it is portrayed in the modern world have such a distaste and repulsion for it. There exists little remnant of Jesus and alarmingly large portions of self-imposed and self- focused doctrine in the church today, rendering a false Gospel a product of this. Needless to say, the general modern Christian body is a poor representation of the high call to exemplify the body of Christ, to walk as he walks, to speak as he speaks, and to love as he loves.  

Apart from God, people tend to have an unnoticed overgrowth of pride and self-absorption that overshadows and entangles the person God has created us to be. As humans we don’t like submitting to anyone’s control but our own, and we don’t realize how confining that is until we come to know God. We get a taste of the freedom He can pull us into if we just reach out our hand. That said, it is not something that is easy to do. The reality is there is an opposing force also fighting for dominion over our lives just as much as God is. It is the principles of Satan himself, disguised as the things of the world that retract us from receiving the new life and salvation that God has for us. Satan wants us to believe that the life we live without God is just the way life is, that there is no being higher and more intelligent than humans, because if there were, we would be more inclined to submit to Him. Satan keeps us bound to a self-centric world so that we only focus inwardly and obey our own personal doctrine, which is inherently sinful and immoral so to separate us from God. But what we fail to see is that by submitting our lives to ourselves, we are unknowingly submitting our lives to the devil. I understand that it is difficult to fathom, but it is simply what I know to be true.  

None of this is to say that I’m now the perfect person after running to Jesus. Every day I fall short of the glory of God, but the truth is, we all do. We have been freed from the shackles of sin, but we sometimes still trip over the chains, and yet God’s grace abounds.