Okay, so this morning, I posted a picture on Facebook of a saying that said, “In order to be irreplaceable you must always be different.”  Now I don’t know about you, but that kind of sums me up to a tee.  For instance, I never went along with the pack.  When everyone around me was a Lakers fan, yep, you guessed it, I chose the Celtics.  And to this day my husband cannot stand the fact that I am a Yankees fan.  Apparently I was born NOT to fit in.

So many of us go around trying our best to just fit in.  It starts when we are kids.  Do you remember being in Middle School/Junior High and being a girl who was different?  An outsider?  I sure do.  And although, it wasn’t called bullying back then, it still happened.

And when you were in the dating years, you tried to fit in with the bar crowd, or the upper echelon scene.  Always looking to meet Mr. Right in all the wrong places.

And then you grew up, married Mr. Right, and here we all are, trying to keep up with the Jones’ instead of thanking God for all of the blessings we do have.  There’s always that illusive thing we are trying to get, whether it’s an internal feeling or an external thing like a car.  If this doesn’t describe you, lucky you! God saved you from all this nonsense!

But here’s what the Bible has to say about all this junk!

^9-10 But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you—from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted. 1 Peter 2:9-19 The Message

⁹ But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. ¹⁰ Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. NIV

Get this… “Called out of darkness and into His wonderful light!  We are chosen to be different.  And sometimes that means feeling like we just don’t belong anywhere.  Sometimes that is lonely.  But God promises to be our companion, He promises to be our husband when we don’t have one, our Daddy when we are missing one.  He makes us together a nation when ours is being scattered to the four winds.

And when we think this looks a tad bit backwards, let’s not forget that God’s ways are better than our ways and His thoughts much smarter than ours.  It is for our benefit and nurturing that this happens.

We are like snowflakes, no two are alike.  We are all necessary, we are all valuable.  we are all irreplaceable in God’s sight.

I love this thought from EE Cummings, “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” So let’s grow up in Jesus, let’s become who we are meant to be.   I think I’ll leave you with that.