Hold on for just a second, count it up slowly. Only 7,423 days of my life have passed.
If I’m lucky, I can plan for at least 29,209 more (that’s age 100).
That’s a lot of days, a lot of changes, and a lot of growth (to think that at one point in my life I weighed less than my backpack is a weird thing to think about.)
But from the very beginning, I’ve been Sophie. And I’ll still be Sophie until I reach my 36,632nd day.
I was thinking the other day about how cool it would be if I had a Twitter-type search engine for myself and I could #Sophie and find all of the stuff in the world that I impacted enough to get a hashtag with my name on it. Then it scared me, because I remembered that for every hashtag that gives out praise there’s another one complaining about exactly the same thing.
The greatest thing I’ve learned over these past four months is to be brave. Beginning with my foot being healed (see link here) in November, then later that same week dying my hair red, I began to see the world without boundaries. The only thing for me to be afraid of was to be afraid.
But my bravery didn’t come from myself. The confidence I tried to dig up from the depth of my gut instead became me believing the lie that I would never be a person who could be brave.
I realized something important. The glory couldn’t go to me.
The glory had to go back to God. Yeah, it’s been a journey. I’m a pride-claiming master. But everything that I couldn’t do became things I could do when I learned to give the glory back to the one who gives everything to me.
Once I realized this, all of my fear left. Because if I hashtag-searched “Sophie,” it’s less about what I have done and more about what I’m doing for God’s Kingdom. I’m gonna keep messing up, I know. I’m never going to be perfect. But there are so many chances for redemption because I’m swimming in an ocean of grace. Every complaint bearing the #Sophie, God helps me to forget so that I can move forward in confidence without fear.
Follow me @hopesophie17. Want to know more about being brave? Comments? Email me at sophie.guetzko@hope.edu. Stay warm!