God Wants Us To Celebrate Our Uniqueness

Joyce: God wants us to celebrate our uniqueness. I was thinking this morning in my prayer time about all the variety of birds and trees and flowers and even rocks and their different shapes and their different colors, so why do we think that if God is so creative in all those things that he wouldn’t be also just as creative in the way that he makes us. It’s easy to look at each other and say we all look different but we all are different.

We have different gifts, different talents, different abilities, different weaknesses and different strengths. The thing is it’s okay. That’s the thing that people don’t get, is it’s okay.

You don’t have to be like somebody else.

Dr. Mintle: When you have to be like somebody else, I always think about that’s what we did in adolescence; we were always trying to find our uniqueness by being the same, and we need to grow out of that adolescent stage of development and get to a maturity where we actually celebrate the uniquenesses that we each have.

Joyce: That’s exactly right. I know that I was tormented for so long trying to compare myself to other people. I thought I should be like my neighbor so i planted a garden, got my husband to plant the garden and I tried to can tomatoes.  I hated the garden and the tomatoes. I tried to make my family’s clothes and honestly I made my husband a pair of shorts. I took sewing lessons. I really got into this thing.

I’m gonna be a regular woman or what I thought the world’s image of what a regular woman was, so I took some sewing lessons, got material and got a sewing machine and I made my husband a pair of shorts. When I got finished, the pockets were longer than the shorts.  That’s still our joke today, those shorts that I made for Dave, but the thing was I hated it! I hated it! I wasn’t fulfilled. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know why I wasn’t happy.  You can’t have joy when you’re trying to be something that you’re not, so we have to make our minds up that it’s okay to be who we are, stop comparing and competing, and come to terms of peace with ourselves.