The invitation to be fully present, engaged, in our own self, story, with others, and in life.

Paul writes in Romans 12:1-2 (MSG) ‘Place Your Life Before God. So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognise what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
We are encouraged to surrender ourselves to an experience of His love, where we can possess our true and genuine selves. Exhorted to not be conformed by the ideas, ideals, opinions, comparisons, thwarting of the ‘world’ around us but be reformed and come fully alive as we allow The Spirit of Love and Truth , Himself to empower us to be all we were formed, designed in Love to be.
This is a beautiful invitation to show up, in truth, to bring our whole selves before God and believe in His realties of who we are.
The great commandment calls us to love God with our whole self, and love others as we love ourselves. To love at all is to be vulnerable, to love is to offer and risk, our selves to others.
The invitation to show up, fully present is in essence the call to live in love.
This love that God lavishes upon us, pursues us to the core, there is no hiding. We are invited to show ourselves. As in Song of Songs, to ‘show your face, for it is lovely’, and the dialogue progresses/ searches out, it reveals her shame, but love calls her ‘dark yet lovely’. Love is exposing worthiness and it is the invitation to us all, will we show ourselves and believe in our worthiness? Despite all things, will we believe in truth and let truth liberate us in our story, in our relationships to fully posses, be fully present and thus experience to live fully alive?
This is the intent of He who is love and truth.
To live before God in the way Paul describes, to fulfil the great commandment, to live in truth, to live vulnerably and thus in love to others, is to fully show up. We must dare to show up, give ourselves and let ourselves be seen. For to love, truly love is to do so.
We must come out of the hiding places, tear off our fig leaves, we must dare boldly to refuse the robes of shame and voice of fears, we must liberate ourselves from their slavery. We must dare to let go of comparison and believe in ourselves.
What is the greatest enemy to your showing up?
Is it fear, self doubt, perfectionism or control, a need for certainty, is it comparison, self worth, anxiety, fear of man, people pleasing, disengagement, shame? We all carry shame and are thwarted by lies, for we have an enemy that seeks to steal, and destroy; and it is our truest self, our beauty, our glory, our heart, he goes after, for he comes against the one thing he can never have, the image and likeness of God himself within us. Shame at its essence is the fear of disconnection. It utters unworthiness against what we were made for, and in. Connection; which is love and belonging. To choose to offer despite the voice of shame, despite the voice of fear and lies is our power. All these things find their way into parts of our stories at times, we will all experience and run into their narratives, but it is for those who seek to live whole and in love, to catch the little foxes that seek to ruin our vineyards, for love can not flourish, we can not bear the fruit of possessing our truth, and liberty if we neglect to uproot the weeds that prevent us from showing up. For it is truth that sets us free.
To really live whole we must engage in our lives from the place of belief; from love, love's voice affirms us in our identity and our worthiness. We receive the courage, the conviction and the faith in communion with truth. Truth declares continually over us with powerful affirmation we are enough, no matter what, we are worthy, we belong, no matter what. Our purpose is in truth, we must cultivate the environment of truth within and around us so we not only engage fully present with God, with ourselves, but also with others. And thus we create the space, extend the invitation to others, truth invites and declares you are enough, you are wanted, you are worthy, you belong!
And in part this is the great commandment and commission. But it is by our willingness to engage and show up with our whole self that we can invite others.
Ways to help you find your true self!
Spend time asking God how he sees you.
Ask yourself: who am I? what do I need? what do I want? what do I believe?
Explore what makes your heart feel life, how do you best connect with people?
Expose insecurities, fears, lies, shame narratives for what they are.
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