Becoming Who You Already Are

Rachel Held Evans once wrote that the Bible is not a sword to be wielded but a story we are invited into. For many who have been told their identity is a problem to be solved — queer Christians pushed to the margins, women silenced in sanctuaries, people of color whose bodies were deemed less-than by the theology of empire — Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 5:17 land differently than the way we were taught.

"If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come." We heard this verse weaponized, turned into an eraser: become new by becoming less yourself. But the Greek word kainos does not mean replacement. It means renewal. Not destruction of what was, but transformation of what is.

Consider the monarch butterfly. It does not become something foreign to itself inside the chrysalis. Its very DNA always carried the blueprint for wings. The caterpillar was never a failed butterfly — it was a butterfly becoming.

This is the radical promise of the Gospel: God is not asking you to abandon the self that the Creator knit together. God is inviting the fullest, most liberated version of you to emerge. The new creation is not the death of your identity but the resurrection of it — freed from shame, from the boxes others built, from every system that told you to shrink.

Beloved, you are not being made into someone else. You are finally, beautifully, becoming who God always dreamed you would be.