Dear Younger Me (A Seat At God’s Table)
Dear Younger Me,
You don’t have to earn a seat at God’s table.
You’ve been taught to earn your spot, and you know what it’s like to be afraid to lose your spot and what it’s like to lose it. When you think about what that felt like to be sent further down the bench, you relive that hurt. You fear messing up because you don’t want to be replaced. And even when you have worked hard for your seat you’re in, and you’re told you belong, you won’t feel like you do belong. You’ll be taught someday to answer why you belong at the table, and you’re going to struggle. You’ll have all the reasons why you don’t belong where you are, when your answer should take the other position.
The words of a Netflix show will stop you someday. An employee shares with her boss how she’s failing and gives him her resignation letter, and he looks at her and tells her she’ll always have a seat next to him. Sometimes you will fail, and sometimes you’ll do all you can and still you’ll fail, but God doesn’t give you a seat on your own merit. He doesn’t ask you to earn it, He doesn’t demote you. You have a seat at God’s table because Jesus made it possible for you to sit there. And accepting that gift is all it takes.
You have a seat with your God, no earning necessary.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
Busy does not equal happy. Granted, resting doesn’t always equal happy either, but you’ll realize the beauty of rest someday. You’ll know what it’s like to be so busy you don’t have lots of time to sleep, and you’ll long for all the fun things to do on weekends and summers spent with the greatest adventures. But you’ll also one day realize how doing absolutely nothing can bring so much joy as well. Will resting mean you aren’t doing enough to push yourself up the ladder? Maybe. But when you run your ship aground, you aren’t going anywhere anyways. So, if you find yourself in a season where you need rest, then rest. Enjoy a Saturday not going anywhere. Take a nap. Appreciate the little things that bring you joy though you may not have a big goal you are working to achieve. Light a candle in the dark, sip some tea, take a bath, read a book. Call a friend, call your grandma, fix a puzzle.
Better yet, and this is a practice to develop, free time can also be spent with God. You aren’t used to giving Him time in the middle of your afternoon but instead giving Him the last awake moments before you sleep. Better and much more life-giving than a nap, though you will find that someday you adore naps, time spent with God fills your soul so much more. And you can’t get more time with Him when you’re running around doing everything else. And, for sure, there will be seasons where finding time with Him will naturally be more difficult. But, like Grandpa will tell you, even five minutes. Make that a habit.
Oh, how I want for you to be filled from beautiful time spent with the Living Water. So, while busy doesn’t equal happy, and rest doesn’t always equal happy, enough rest and time spent with Him bring joy.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
Look out and look up…to others and God. When you live focused on yourself, you see all your faults, failures, and flaws, and that rules you. You forget God’s command to love others, and you forget to love God. Look out at others. Love them. Serve them. Hear them. Celebrate them. See God in them. Life isn’t all about you. In fact, it’s not about you. Your life needs to be about Him, and one of the ways you do that is by loving His people.
Look up at God. Look at Him. You’ll realize someday that honing in on your faults only seems to make them larger, but when you stop focusing on them and just look at God, you can see yourself more clearly. That’s not to say you ignore your mistakes and mess-ups, but rather you decide not to be absorbed by them. And when you look at God, you realize you aren’t Him. Behold His love and power and might and sovereignty and know He reigns and He’s over you. Marvel at Him. Rejoice in Him. Take the magnifying glass off examining yourself and instead magnify your God.
I know you want to be the best version of you and you see all these things you want to change about yourself, but the very best you is simply you in God. The best you is you running to His heart. The best you is you championing Him and His people.
So look out at His people, and look up at Him. In Colossians 3, it says, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” That’s where your eyes and your mind should be.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
Cherish the grace instead of the guilt. There’s that memory that’ll stick with you for your life, of that time when your mom bought you a big balloon at a school event and you accidentally let it go. You watched that balloon float to the gymnasium ceiling in tears, and it was sad you lost that balloon, but I think equally, if not more than that, you felt like a disappointment. And your mom, so gracious, bought you another balloon. And yet, in all the years since that night, it’s still the guilt that overrides the grace.
Girl, you have so much to learn about grace. You find it so hard to accept good things when you are living in the regret of your faults. Honey, you have to change where you fix your eyes. Your focus is on all the wrong, but God wants to lavish His grace on you, and grace should not be overlooked. God didn’t intend for our own guilt to overshadow His fantastic, indescribable grace. And I don’t know why Mom bought you another balloon that night, but I think it’s safe to say that she didn’t want you to stay stuck in remorse over that balloon you lost. She gave you another gift, and gifts are reasons to rejoice.
Learn from those moments, but don’t let the guilt rule you, because grace, whether from people, God, or God through His people, is a gift to be celebrated.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
Happy Valentine’s Day, dear one. While it’s a day our culture celebrates romantic love, you’ve been raised by a wonderful family who has celebrated their love for you every Valentine’s Day. And while you are waiting for your Valentine and even when he comes, cherish God’s love letters He sends you through the people in your life.
In 2 Corinthians, Paul describes of the church, “Clearly you are a letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This ‘letter’ is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts.” The people and their faith were proof of God’s work through the ministry of Paul and other disciples. It makes me smile thinking a little further to the picture that each person in your life is a love letter of God as He’s worked in them, and you get to read the letter, too.
See God’s love through your dad who would do anything for you, your mom who answers the phone to listen to every fear and concern, your sisters who come close to hold and comfort you in your hurts, your friends who celebrate and delight in you each day, your coworkers who are your strength when you are weak, your grandparents who have always cheered you on, your aunts and uncles and cousins who smile when they see you, and when the time comes, the love of your life who will show you what pursuing love looks like through thick and thin.
As each one lives out characteristics of the love of Jesus for you, cherish them, and learn to see God’s love in them as gifts to you. Just know, sweet one, how incredibly loved you are, even if you don’t hear the words, “I love you” as often as you’d want, that you are loved more than you know by God’s people and by Him.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
Guard your heart. Your heart, your spirit, is a beautiful thing God has given to you. Protect what is there, and be careful with what you let in. You learned how important defense was in high school basketball. More than anything else on the court, playing solid defense was your job. You had some tough assignments to guard some talented opposing players, to keep them from getting the ball and scoring on your team. What if you learned to defend and guard your own heart?
The deceiver will trick you and make you doubt yourself, but oh, how I wish you would learn to recognize what are lies and what is true, before you let those doubts make their home in your heart. Guard your faith. Don’t let the circumstances of this broken world chip away at the faith you have in your God. In the book of 1 Timothy in the Bible, Paul writes to Timothy, saying, “Timothy, guard what God has entrusted to you.” The faith that Timothy had needed to be protected because there would be other people he’d encounter who had different beliefs.
For you, it might not necessarily be other people who challenge your beliefs. It may be society, and it may just be the enemy beating you down. But guard what you have and don’t let go. Other words in Scripture say to hold fast to what is good and hold on to your crown. Hold on, guard your heart, protect the vulnerable places that your mind and heart are.
And the good news is, you aren’t alone in guarding your heart. You have the people around you to remind you of who you are and what the truth is. They help you, along with God’s Word, to reinforce your heart and mind. And you have God’s Word, you have Him, to woo you, to speak and sing His love over you.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
Try new things. Remember that week of your life when your motto was “Try something new every day!”? You set aside preconceived notions and just let yourself be excited to experience what you hadn’t before. And now, you’re also brave and adventurous (sometimes) with menus at a restaurant, being willing to pick a new meal that you haven’t had before. And some day, you have a desire to go skydiving. Yet sometimes, there are things in life you are afraid of, and the fear holds you back from experiencing what otherwise could bring you joy.
Think about trying out for tennis. You’d never played the game before, hardly held a racquet, and yet you chose to try it. Can you remember if you were afraid? Can you remember if you were nervous? You might have been. Yet, what you will remember more is your desire to do it. And looking back, I can’t believe you weren’t more nervous to try out! Wouldn’t it be nice to approach every new thing like that?
It’s surprising what can happen when you give what you’re afraid of a chance. You might find you like it, and you might find that it really wasn’t so bad like you imagined it to be. You might find yourself thinking, “Why didn’t I do this years ago?” And there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes when you face your fear, too.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
Be gracious. Yes, it’s far easier to extend grace to others than it is to yourself, but there are moments and days when you could extend a little more, you know? There are times you tend to be selfish, and then you let others get on your nerves instead of being loving, generous, forgiving, or understanding.
Proverbs 11:16 says, “A gracious woman gets honor, and violent men get riches.” I know you want to be that gracious woman. I know you want that heart of letting love be your highest goal as it says in 1 Corinthians 14. It’s not your natural inclination to be others-focused instead of self-focused, but that’s what love calls us to do. When your little sister ruins that collectible toy, when your ears hear words that pierce your heart, when you are asked to compromise over choosing what you really want, learn grace and love and understanding.
I think if you realized that what irritates you won’t matter in the long run, and that grace for the moment can change your perspective and attitude for the future, you won’t let the little things bother you quite so much. Yes, there are actions of others that will hurt you. Yes, there are actions of others that will simply rub you the wrong way. I’m not telling you to shove the pain away, but to acknowledge that there are sometimes things under the surface of those actions that you can’t see and might not understand until later. And, when you choose grace and forgiveness, you also choose a softer heart.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
If you have nothing else, you’re okay, because when you strip everything away, it’s just you and your Maker.
If all your relationships were taken away, if your skills and talents were gone, if you had no job…it wouldn’t matter because you have enough in the presence of the One who holds you and loves you. It’s like a child who makes a project and carries it around because they love it and are proud of their creation. Also, think about the love your parents had for you even before you were born. As a manifestation of their love, they loved you though you had nothing to offer them.
I also think that as a manifestation of your parents’ love, you are a manifestation of your Heavenly Father’s love. He wanted you and watched over you and purposed you, which makes simply you more important than anything else you could offer, or any other blessing He could offer you in this world.
Hold to Isaiah 54:5, “For your Maker is your husband — the LORD Almighty is his name — the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.”
You are a loved and valued child of the King, and the Maker loves you.
Love,
Megan
Dear Younger Me,
Oh, sweet one, if you only knew how much you don’t need to overthink. You sometimes hate your brain, but what if you saw your brain as a gift from God, with a beautiful gift to think analytically? You just need to learn how to apply that analytical brain in the right ways. Sometimes you over-analyze so much that you end up in fear and doubt and you lose yourself. Refuse that. Choose instead to stand on what you know is true.
Even the great gifts and blessings of God you overthink and overanalyze if you are really worthy of them. What if you recognized that though you aren’t worthy of God’s good gifts, you don’t have to overthink them and you can simply accept what God has given knowing that He loves to bless you, His child?
Jesus came to set you free from sin and brokenness and give you an abundant life. When you get stuck in your head, you aren’t living. God isn’t asking you to be God and have it all figured out. If you took a look at your track record of overthinking, I’m sure most often your overthinking hasn’t actually helped but made the situation worse. God is God, not you, and He’s already done all the thinking for you. What a relief! Of course, there are situations that call for proper analysis. It’s definitely okay to give proper weight to the right matters. However, lay down those matters you’ve tried to figure all out by grasping them in your two hands and with your own brain instead of holding it out to God in trust, in faith, and in gratitude.
Just imagine God smiling at you, saying, “Daughter, don’t overthink my love for you. Don’t overthink my gifts for you. Trust me.”
Love,
Megan