Author: marquitabp

Through His Eyes

"You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God." 1Peter 3:4 NLT

Hey everybody! I know its super late…but this weighed heavy on my heart tonight. If you don't love anyone else, please love yourself. It really hurts my heart to witness how poorly many people view themselves. I know how it feels to have a poor view of myself. Its only by the grace of God that I was delivered from that. When you have an unhealthy view of yourself, you inadvertently negatively affect those around you. Your pessimist view of self can't stay bottled within, and of course like toxic waste it infects its surroundings. Like foul air that swiftly permeates its surroundings, the lie that you believe about yourself will spread and infect other areas of your life as long as you allow it. You have to view yourself the way God sees you. You are truly precious, so valuable that God wanted to save you from eternal damnation by receiving a pure sacrifice.

I've noticed that many black people here in Charleston have the crabs in a bucket mentality and still heavily believe in the dark skin versus lighter skin paradigm. I personally recognize myself as brown because that's all I am, a shade of brown. Beauty is more than the reflective surface of your skin; on the contrary, the most beautiful person may not be the most attractive outwardly but have a heart of love for all. I'll never forget this day…when I was still taking heavy doses of steroids and had gained quite a lot of weight, I absolutely hated how I looked. I nitpicked about everything I could, my skin, my stomach, my everything. I felt like I was being held prisoner in my own body and God knows I prayed every single day to not feel that way and for deliverance. You see, I had some negative experiences during my childhood and associated beauty with being skinny and having long hair. Luckily my prized hair had not fallen out like most people with a lupus diagnosis (I told yall I didn't have lupus! Lol). But everything else was foreign to me. I cried every single day over the changes I had no control over. I couldn't control how the medicines made me feel or look and I wanted it to go away. But thank God for the angelic child He had cross my path one day at K-Mart.

I don't really even remember what I was looking for, but the little boy had stopped and dropped his hand from his moms and stared at me. She came back and told him to come on, then he said "she's pretty" about me. It made me cry because I didn't see what he saw. I saw the scarred body from uncontrolled weight gain, the rashes and acne scars from the varied medicines I now had to take, and the broken heart because for once there was something I could not fix. I learned that day that he saw what I could not see and God opened my eyes. Since then I have come leaps and bounds and I love myself for who I am, scars and all. I get a little sad from time to time, but I know that God saw something in me worth saving.

So sorry its so long…and I actually had to wait to finish this. Getting the spirit mentioned above is no easy process. You must submit to God every single thing that is bothering you or weighing you down. Stop merely looking at life through your physical eyes and look beyond the things that hinder us from truly seeing each other. Once you love yourself unconditionally, you can truly love others.

"And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Matthew 22:39 NIV

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Pressure

"Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup and placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand.”  Genesis 40:11

My sister in ministry (and in life) sent me a message a little over a week ago mentioning depression.  I felt the need to write about this, as I have been graciously favored by God to be delivered from depression a few times now.  Clinically defined, depression is a mood disorder in which feelings of sadness, loss, anger, or frustration interfere with everyday life for a long period of time.

Its funny to me how one word can have so many meanings and interpretations.  Look at the root word here–press.  To my surprise press has many means, as both a noun, a transitive and an intransitive verb.  To press as mentioned above implies pressure applied to something.  Press also means to distress or trouble. To press can also mean to keep pushing, have courage, and to persevere.  The prefix de which can mean down, away from, off, entirely, or reverse the action of.  The suffix ion means the act or condition or result of.  Combining these gives us de-press-ion which means the condition of being troubled entirely–or in whole, as a depression negatively affects your mind, body, and spirit man.

Pressure and time are the two ingredients needed to create some of the most beautiful precious jewels ever seen by the human eye.  Diamonds are nothing but carbon, which makes up common coal, pressurized over time.  The same process creates rubies, emeralds, sapphires and alexandrite, some of which have values that are out of this world.  But the great jewel is what you become when you endure depressing situations and circumstances with God as your anchor.  As said in 1 Peter 1:7, "These have come so that your faith–of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire–may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed."  Keep pressing!!  I love you as always!

"We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair." 2 Corinthians 4:8 NLT