I Am

I am the product of a thousand memories, a thousand moments, a thousand people.  I am the result of everything I have learned and experienced and felt over the past 17 years of my life.  I am the outcome of the things I have chosen to do, the things I have chosen not to do, and the effects of those choices. 

And yet I am more than that.

If I depend on my own intrensic value to prove my worth, I am nothing.  In everything I have done, there will always be someone who has done it better.  I would be the sum of all my parts, but nothing more.  I would put my value in the hands of fate and my worth at the mercy of chance occurences, encounters, and opportunities.

But I choose to believe I am more than that.

I am more than the poor choices that I have made.  I am more than a random scramble of events and people and parts that have come together and formed a personality.  I am more than right and wrong and facts and figures; more than a number, more than a name, more than a human.

I am alive.

I am redeemed.

I am forgiven.

I am a Child, an Heir, and a Soilder.

I am a testimony in a great story, a supporting character in the most powerful tale ever told.

I am an explorer who was unable to discover the Truth until it took on the form of a man and walked the earth, living, breathing, dying, then living again.

I am a piece of smooth metal, sometimes in need of a good clean, unable to produce the Light but still able to shine it out into the night, beckoning the tired sailors back to solid ground.

I am a worn travel walking down a path, one with obstacles and roadblocks, but I have a guide who not only knows the way, but is The Way.

I am a desert, drenched in an unexhaustable rain that pours from the sky and penetrates into the deepest parts of my soul.

I am less than fine.  I am more than fine.

I am the broken-hearted person who was unable to put my heart back together but found One who could, One who was so powerful that when He put the two halves together they somehow became more than whole.

I am, not because I am, but because He is.

Because He is the Redeemer.

Because He is the Forgiver.

Because He is the Father, the Master, and the Commander.

Because He is the Author and the Story.

Because He is the Truth.

Because He is the Light.

Because He is the Way.

Because He is the Living Water that quenches my thirst once and for all.

Because He is the Lover who replaced my heart of stone with a heart of flesh, tender and responsive.

I am because He is I Am.