The world kept telling me I was the sum of my past
That the man I was lived in a house where the walls were covered in a plastered cast of memories that mirrored the old me

The younger version of me before my submersion into anger

There’s a picture drawn in pen of a black background

It’s where my imagination filled in the blanks with familial estrangement and constant danger

When you don’t feel like you matter it’s hard to fathom that a God could care

So I began to act out because for me there was nothing but doubt

no God no light and no half spirit half brother

No matter how high I got to battle the lows I still felt that I was trapped in that darkness in that house with which neglect had built

It had walls that would sweat and left my breathing inept because my lung capacity was filled with a loud deafening shrill

I could see red and every day I woke up upset that I wasn’t dead

I was living my life fast with a tank that was empty and a soul that felt filthy

I hated the world and hated myself as into the darkness I continued to fade

I felt abused so I just kept on abusing waiting for death in the bed that I had made

Little did I know that a death was exactly what was needed

A dying of self and what would be left was an unfamiliar freedom

The day I was baptized I still remember that I had no idea why

Why when they talked about the pool my feet began to move

I felt out of control as if something or someone had ahold of my soul directing my steps telling me which way to go

I stepped into the water fully clothed in my sin

Though I came out brand new i still had to choose to begin again

But ever since that day the water has become my life’s pivot

I still felt some of the old yet God told me all of it He could hold

I simply had to give it

See the world kept telling me that I was the sum of everything I had done

Yet Jesus tells me that between the two the divide is vast

The new me renders the newly created creation

He keeps telling me

My child, in you I am doing something new

Don’t you see it

It springs forth like rivers abounding with good fruit and I am making a way in the wilderness and streams that have cleaned the depravity from your soul

Faith doesn’t eliminate trouble and mistakes but it accelerates the healing revealing that God can circumvent the time that it takes to understand that you are not a mistake

I am not the sum of my past because I have been redeemed

I am not what I have done to others nor am I what’s been done to me

For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it to

He wants to give it especially to you

The Son is Jesus Christ and He is The Answer to every question and every vice that has plagued your life

God burned down that house that was covered with mirrors that kept reflecting death

Now the sky provides the echo through a kaleidoscope of a vibrant light that guides my steps

He made me new and I’ll spend my life telling everyone I see

That He wants to do for you the same thing He did for me

To make YOU

a new creation