However, looking back I just wasn’t fully committed to my walk with Christ. It took some time for me to realize that I had to make a decision whether or not I was gonna be who God intended me to be with the understanding my life isn’t my own.
Over the course of my life, I’ve been able to experience a lot of new things by continually being a part of the church. I still remember my first time experiencing the infilling of the Holy Ghost like it was yesterday. Why? Because it was something that ignited a change so powerful inside of me. It was as if a weight lifted off of me and I finally knew what real peace, joy, and freedom was. Before I knew it, I was at a beach nearby where I lived and I was baptized in Jesus’ Name. I believe I was only twelve at the time, and now standing here today I am an eighteen year old who just recently graduated high school.
In the time frame from when I was baptized until this very moment, my life has never been the same. I look back and see the hand of God in every step, the things that He has brought me through, and it has only allowed me to see how much more life there is when Jesus is at the center of it. I began to grow a little more in my understanding of living as a Pentecostal/ apostolic in terms of separation, holiness, and really living it out. I always remembered that if you were standing out, doesn’t that make you “outstanding”? It’s totally fine being different and choosing not to follow the crowds. Jesus called us out of the darkness and into His marvelous light. We now hold a treasure inside of us, a light from our hearts to our hands for the world to see and know that Jesus is God. As we walk in newness we find ourselves walking on a different path. There’s a cost, it’s a fight. However, it’s all worth it living as a chosen vessel. To know that with all the cracks and brokenness I have as a vessel -my flaws and imperfections- Jesus still chooses me...in fact, that’s why He chooses us, because we can’t do it on our own and we will only realize how much we need Him.
There’s an example my dad would preach about in church about a Japanese art called “kintsugi”. It’s actually known for centuries to be the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery. You’d take the broken pieces of an artifact and put them together by a special tree sap lacquer and dust it with powdered gold, silver or platinum. What’s powerful and meaningful about the reframed artifact is that the beauty is found in it’s cracks.
When we are chosen by God, it doesn’t mean He won’t break us. In fact God will break us so He can reframe us in the way He wants us to be. I heard a quote from an apostolic bishop and He said “God will break us because He’d rather have us limping to Him rather than running from Him”.
God will take your broken pieces and turn it into something beautiful. Where the cracks and areas of brokenness will be the most meaningful because you can say it was an area of your life that God repaired and shaped so that you could be used to glorify Him.
““But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us; We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.”
2 Corinthians 4:8-10 KJV
