"You are all together beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you"
Beauty, love and identity are three things that God has been reshaping and redefining in my life and heart the past couple weeks. He spent the entirety of both leader and participant training camps speaking to me about my beauty to Him and opening my eyes to the infinite amount of ways that He pursues my heart perfectly.There have been times this past week that I have literally felt Him staring at my face and staring at every part of my heart, both of which He's already memorized and yet His desire for them never dwindles. I don't know if this is something that has ever really happened to me before. There have been times where I've just been sitting or laying down somewhere when suddenly everything around me stops and all that I'm aware of is that He is looking right at me. I can feel His eyes on me so strongly that it takes my breath away and I all I can really do is respond in tears. I've never felt more known in my life.
It's hard to understand, believe and receive the love of God if you don't understand that you are known by Him. My whole entire life I've been taught that God loves me, but it wasn't until He began opening my eyes to the fact that He actually knows every single thing about me that that Love actually became real to me. God's Love is something that is way more personal than any of us even realize, and it's something that He's been constantly reminding me of. He knows that little gestures mean more to me than grand ones. He knows that I love glow in the dark stars so much that He gave me a room at training camp where they were covering the ceiling (I cried about this too). He gave me a seat by the window on airplane when we were flying towards the sunset just so I could stare at it and think about Him the whole time. He gave me that seat just so I could listen to His voice as He talked to me about how He finds me to be a million times more breathtaking than what I was seeing out my window, which is funny because I was telling Him the exact same thing. Sometimes I notice these things, but the majority of the times I don't, and that's when He whispers "baby, this is for you".
I know He brought me to New Zealand to deepen this. For a while I was really unsure of why He chose me for New Zealand, but now I know why. I've known all along that He wants me here for the girls on my team and for the people I meet here, but now I'm fully aware that He brought me here for me and Him. I still can't even begin to process the beauty that I get to live in for the next two months. The beach is a ten minute walk away. To get there you have to walk through the forest, next to the river and towards the mountains, all of which you can see in the same glance. I don't know if I've ever been anywhere that is this beautiful in my life. It's so beautiful that I just stood there, feeling completely overwhelmed by it all. He knows that this is exactly what my heart loves, so He brought me here. He knows that this is exactly the place I need to be for this exact moment in my life with Him, and He's so in love with me that He wanted to bring me here to be with Him.
