By Shannon Wright
If you spend any amount of time scrolling through social media, it’s easy to believe that everyone else has their life more together than you do.
Their families seem happier. Their marriages look stronger. Their homes are cleaner. Their vacations are better. Their children seem to have it all figured out.
But something I’m discovering in my own search for myself is this: almost everyone feels this way.
The truth is, no family is perfect. No marriage is perfect. No person has everything figured out. We are all a little broken in our own ways and what we see on social media is usually just the highlights.
So let this be the last day you believe the lies the devil has been telling you, or the lies you’ve been telling yourself.
You are not the only one struggling. You are not the only one who has made mistakes. You are not the only one whose life didn’t turn out exactly the way you thought it would. And you are certainly not beyond being used for something good!
I was recently reminded of a memory from when I was a little girl.
I remember my aunt wrapping a Christmas gift for me in a box that once held dishes. When I unwrapped the paper and saw the box, I didn’t want to open it because I was convinced there were actually dishes inside. I was so disappointed that I remember crying and being genuinely upset. It took me a while to finally open the box.
But when I did, I discovered that there was an amazing gift inside!
Looking back now, that childhood memory makes me think about the way God works.
Sometimes he packages his greatest gifts in what looks from the outside like the worst possible box.
Maybe your box has been beaten up a little. Maybe it’s torn, weathered and worn. Maybe it has been rained on. Maybe life has thrown it around so much that you wonder how it could possibly contain anything other than broken dishes.
Maybe you look at yourself and think I’m the worst box of all. But God doesn’t see you that way.
There’s a gift inside of you that the world needs.
Sometimes God will take the very parts of our lives that we wish we could erase and use them to help someone else.
You may be the person in your family that God uses to break generational curses.
You may be the person who says something to a stranger at exactly the moment they need to hear it.
You may be the one who encourages an entire group of people because you understand what they are going through.
The very thing you are most ashamed of, the thing you wish had never happened, the thing that caused you the most pain, may eventually become the very thing God uses as your ministry.
That doesn’t mean the painful things were good. It doesn’t mean we have to pretend they didn’t hurt or that we didn’t hurt other people. It simply means that God can take something broken and create something beautiful from it.
Before you decide that your own story is too messy, your mistakes are too big, or your past has disqualified you from doing something meaningful, OPEN THE BOX.
The gift inside could be exactly what someone else has been praying for!
(Shannon Wright is a real estate agent who is also a digital journalist for Webster Parish Journal. She lives in Sibley.)