This Kingdom Needs You.

When I sat down to begin writing this about five minutes ago, I had just finished reading a writer’s beautifully constructed article, instantly wondering why words don’t flow through my brain and out onto a keyboard like that. Oh, and let's not forget when I was scrolling through a photographer’s stunning Instagram feed about three minutes beforehand with the thought, “wow, her photos are so gorgeous, why can’t mine look like that,” tearing its way through my mind leaving nothing but insecurities and discontentment. We’ve all been there, especially with the pressures of social media breathing heavily down the backs of our necks.If there’s one word that tends to sit in the driver's seat of our choices: what we wear, how we act, how we look on a daily basis, what we post on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, it’s this:Comparison.A word that weighs heavy on my heart, mainly because I struggle with it every single day. We’ve all heard it before, we all know it exists, and we all know it’s a toxin capable of ruining relationships, identities, and especially creativity, so why do we allow ourselves to become slaves to it? As I’m typing this right now I’m asking myself the same question and chuckling at how ridiculous it seems for me to feel bad about who I am, where I am, or what I look like all because someone else has something I don’t.Galatians 1:10 says: “Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”Let me be the first to remind you, because we don’t hear it enough, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, knit perfectly together in order to fulfill a unique purpose, HIS purpose. Oh, and did I forget to mention that this purpose, the one the Creator of this entire universe created you for, it’s one that only you can fulfill.This Kingdom needs you. It needs your mistakes, your faults, your mess. It needs your gifts, your experiences, and your strengths. It doesn’t need the version of someone else that you attempt to paint on and live out every day only to end up exhausted and discouraged. God created you to influence this world, and you will never influence the world by trying to be like it.Picture a puzzle that’s been completed and put together for just a second. The final product is always worth all the work it took to put it together, right? When everything looks cohesive, and you come to realize that all the individual pieces look blurry, pixelated, and hazy, but they come together in the end to create this final masterpiece. If one piece is missing, or there's a duplicate of one piece, the puzzle looks flawed and unfinished, but when every piece does its part, and every piece takes on the role it's destined for, unity is discovered.Each of us holds one of those jagged, ridged, uneven, matchless pieces to the puzzle that is this beautiful Kingdom, and that’s a piece that only your soul can fill. "Purpose" is such a simple word, yet it bears so much weight and confusion at times. While I may not be able to tell you what your specific purpose is that God has for you, I can tell you that it's been uniquely designed, so much so that not a single person walking this earth besides you gets the privilege of walking with it. It may be a daily battle, and it definitely won't be easy by any means, but I encourage you to choose a life embracing your differences because you have absolutely no reason at all to be a slave to the enemy’s hoax known as "comparison."words by Sarah Mohan and photo by Hailey Pierce