Blogging today with a great community at Lisa-Jo Baker’s “Five Minute Friday”. Click on the icon above to read other five-minute posts on this one word:

CHOOSE

We sit in a circle on the carpet, those six sweet teenage girls and myself. Bibles open in our laps, finding intimacy in this corner of church.

I want them to choose, each one of them, who and what will define them. Will it be the guy they’ve been dating, the words spoken by a not-so-nice “friend”, the grades earned in sophomore English? The illegal substance they take into their lungs late at night? The rail-thin image they work so hard to maintain?

My heart aches for them. It seems not so long along I had to CHOOSE. I’m choosing still, each day, I tell them. We never stop being a girl who wants acceptance, who wants to be loved……who wants to be different.

I ask them to choose the only thing, the one thing, that can fill that cavernous hole in the pit of their souls. I lead them to verses in Ephesians 3.

“And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

I tell them that He knew them, even in the womb, and that He has a plan for them, to lead them to become all that He envisioned for them. Before they were created. Before time began.

I hug them and ask them, “Do you believe that?”

They nod, though I see doubt in some eyes.

We pray and I ask the One who chose them to show them how to choose Him.