Nobody

Known as an eccentric and an introvert, Emily Dickinson wrote poetry that often expressed her need for privacy and reclusiveness. Her desire for anonymity could be construed as humility—it should not concern us at all that people do not know us—but for some, a retiring nature is grounded in a deep dislike for oneself: “I’m someone to be kept out of sight.”

Perhaps you’re like that: wondering why God ever made you, longing to be someone else. But is it not better to be what God has chosen to make you? “For to have been thought about—born in God’s thoughts—and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest, most precious thing in all thinking. Is it not . . . ?”[1]

David elaborates the same thought in Psalm 139, describing himself in utero as God’s special creation, pondering this awesome being that is me!

“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 [in Hebrew, awesome!]. 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 [his mother's womb], your eyes saw my unformed body [fetus]. All the days ordained for me were written in your book [the blueprint for me] before one of them came to be” (Psalm 139:13–16).

Do you realize that you have been thought about and made by God? You are one of a kind, woven together according to a divine template, intricately “embroidered” in your mother’s womb, a creation that that has no parallel in the universe.

Long before you were born, you existed in God’s thoughts. Long before your parents loved or neglected you, your peers admired or rejected you, your teachers, colleagues, and employers encouraged or disheartened you, you were known and loved by Love itself. God saw you and took delight in you. He gazed at what He had made and was glad. He loved it and said, “It is good!”

Someday soon, you’ll love it too and will forget the self you now abhor. If you could but see yourself now as you will be one day—a lustrous, exquisitely beautiful, immortal creature—you would be stupefied and strongly tempted to fall on your knees in worship.

So on ahead there is unimagined splendor, but even now you are being beautified, “metamorphosed” from one degree of glory to the next.[2] The love of God is at work in you to transform unsightliness into the inexpressible beauty of holiness.

The love that moves the sun and stars and fills the earth with beauty is making you lovely. It is happening now. It will go on forever and ever, for there is no end to infinite love.

~David Roper

[2] 2 Corinthians 3:18: Paul’s exact word, metamorphoomai, means “to change the essential form or nature of something, to become entirely different” (Louw & Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament).