by Mo Isom
As nervous and anxious as I was about handing over a year of my life, I was also excited for the challenge. I cleverly dubbed my mission “Kissless Till Next Christmas” and committed to a year of intimate exclusivity with Jesus. I decided to treat my relationship with God like I would treat a monogamous relationship with another person. I carried myself as if I were taken—I didn’t allow my eyes to wander, I didn’t flirt, and I certainly didn’t give away any of myself physically. I entered into a yearlong commitment and never could have imagined all God was going to wreck in me.
Seen. Known. Secure. Forgiven. Daughter. Masterpiece.
It was hard, at first. The first three months of my intimacy fast felt like an eternity. The voluntary wreckage of my obsession with praise and affirmation from the opposite sex was startlingly challenging. The boldness it took to surrender my whole heart to God served to reveal my weaknesses quickly. In the first several weeks I felt vulnerable and exposed as I realized the embarrassing depth of my dependency. Like an addict detoxing, I had plenty of days where my pride ached and my heart swayed and my flesh yearned for a fix. I felt like I was catching myself constantly. I realized that flirting and teasing and exercising power were almost second nature to me. It didn’t help that I couldn’t turn on my computer or watch TV without something tempting or testing me. In a sex-crazed, relationship-dazed, one-night-stand culture, I became overwhelmingly aware of the nonstop triggers shaping the perspective and relationship standards in our society.
For the first time in my spiritual walk, I began to get a taste of the intentionality required of me. I suppose I had lived most of my adolescence like a game—determining my decisions or reactions as I went, on a case-by-case basis. There had always been a strategy to the games played between women and men, but the thrill of the chase had also come with the promise of guess-as-you-go spontaneity. Now I was forced to pay attention to everything. Scripture calls us to guard our hearts, to cling to purity, and to take every thought captive and submit them to Christ. What I realized quickly was this required me to be constantly aware, constantly focused, and constantly transparent with God. It was initially exhausting. But at the same time I found that with every day that successfully passed I gained confidence in embracing my small victories. As days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, my mentality shifted from weary crawling to confident walking and eventually to bold running toward the King. I gained confidence and determination as I pressed through the year and eventually became aware of all that I was learning. The most fundamental revelation was this: in Christ I was seen, known, and secure, a forgiven daughter and a purposed masterpiece.
I began to foundationally trust that I was seen by God. Not only had He proven that to me in my car accident when He boldly and personally answered my cries and revealed Himself, but He continued to remind me of it as I learned to fix my eyes on Him daily. For a long time I had struggled with feeling like I was forgotten. Maybe you’ve been wrestling with feeling that way too. I didn’t always feel God, or feel like I was loved by God, or feel like I had the ability to hear God like so many people talked about. For a lot of my churched youth I didn’t know if I was doing something wrong or missing something, and I was too nervous I would seem foolish or inadequate if I voiced that I just didn’t understand what everyone else seemed to be experiencing. Ultimately my frustration culminated into feeling like God must have forgotten me, particularly after my dad passed, and in my suffering I ran from the God whom I felt had failed me. I projected anger toward God on the surface, but in my depths I was aching because I felt like I wasn’t seen.
But when I intentionally put on blinders to the world and entered into my intimacy fast, I realized I wasn’t the one forgotten. I was the one who had forgotten, all along, to set my eyes on God. When we fix our eyes on the sovereign and omnipresent power of the King, we learn that there is never a moment we aren’t sought after and wholly seen. He does reveal Himself in the big, bold productions at times, but more often than not, I learned, our God is a God of details and small things. He delights in whispers to our hearts we must be quiet enough to hear. And we must be present enough to see the subtle signs that He is with us, the frequent “coincidences” we can begin to recognize as God-ordained orchestrations. And we can notice the beauty of the world around us in His immeasurable creation.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from Your presence?
If I go up in the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast. (Ps. 139:7–10)
When I began to pay attention, I realized He was everywhere, in everything, and constantly delighting in me.
The next thing I began to realize was that I was deeply and intently known by God. I came across Psalm 139:13–14 and meditated over its truth for several months of my journey: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
I believe God’s works are wonderful. I also believe He created all things. So if His works are far from average or mundane or ordinary, and He formed our lives and our bodies, then what does that say about you and me?
For so long I had based my self-worth and identity in the things I could achieve. I felt valuable when I achieved success and less than good enough when I failed at or struggled with things. My perception of myself was constantly determined by the reflection of my endeavors and the response from other people I would receive. But God took that season of my life to crash through the self-absorbed mirrors that surrounded me and remind me that my self-worth hung on the cross at Calvary. I realized that the most irrelevant things in the equation were my works—and that His works meant everything in the summation of my worth. Not only had He fearfully and wonderfully created me, He had sustained me and saved me, and His works alone deserved all the glory.
To be known by God was the most glorious thing. His loving knowledge of my needs, my quirks, my strengths, and my weaknesses made the unique things about me defining factors of my beauty. It armored me to stand against any criticism or scrutiny. I was His creation—as are you. And the most beautiful assuredness of our worth blossoms out of our ability to know God and our unshakable awareness that we are known by God too.
I also came to believe that, in Christ, I was secure. Not only did my faith in Jesus secure my heavenly position for eternity but knowing I was seen and known by God helped eradicate my self-focused insecurities about things here on earth. I hadn’t relapsed into my eating disorder for several years, but remnants of insecurity and overcompensated control still lingered in me. In my time alone with Jesus, though, He gave me a wake-up call about my insecurities that instantly and deeply made me ache.
I pictured myself standing in front of a mirror nitpicking my body and hating what I saw reflecting back at me. Then I pictured myself standing at the foot of the cross. Looking up at Jesus as He hung beaten and bloodied and swollen, nailed to the wood that stretched out on both sides of Him. I remembered that where He hung was the place that had previously been reserved for me. I was reminded of the price He paid to set me free. I looked up at Him as He sucked in fleeting breaths, a clear display of how much God fiercely loved me, and then I looked down and spit on the foot of the cross, snarling that what Jesus was doing just wasn’t good enough for me.
That vision was gut-wrenching. And infuriating. I cried the day I pictured that, and pleaded with God to forgive me. In response He interpreted the things I had seen and clarified to me that every time I nitpicked my body, the beautiful creation He had crafted in His image, it was like mocking His ability to sculpt beautiful things. That every time I tore myself down with negative thoughts and negative words it was like staring Christ, who
knowingly died to reveal to me my immeasurable value and worth, in the eyes and telling Him that the sacrifice He made wasn’t good enough to make me believe the same things about myself. My insecurities reeked of arrogance. Sure, I could project it all to be about surface-level things, but the fact of the matter was, at the core, I wasn’t insecure about my body. I was subtly in doubt that God was capable of creating wonderful things. I wasn’t fixated on control; I was overcompensating for the fact that I subtly doubted God was big enough and sovereign enough and loving enough to orchestrate things as they unfolded.
My insecurities were rooted in a deep and bleeding heart condition that I had to surrender. So I clung to the Word as I wrecked my anxious fears and leaned into the truth that, in Christ, I was secure. And He was seated in a position higher than me and fully in control. “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go” (Josh. 1:9).
One of the most transformative fundamentals I learned as I walked hand-in-hand with Jesus was that I was also forgiven—fully. There was so much I had kept hidden in the dark. My sexual sin still held me in a stranglehold. Even though I was walking through a season of purity and celibacy, that didn’t erase the bondage and heart-ties that still lingered from my reckless promiscuity. If anything, this season of intentionally battling those triggers and temptations and desires in myself made me intensely aware of how easily I had handed myself away before. My sexual sin had to be dealt with head-on if I ever wanted to understand the deep value of purity when this fast drew to a close. If I wanted to live differently, I had to tackle the things that had previously made me live similarly to the world around me.
For a while bringing so much embarrassing messiness to the throne was intimidating. But God quickly reminded me that surrendering my messiness was the whole point of the journey. That it was a messy King-story encountering a messy me-story with the promise that it would all come together for His glory, in spite of everything. Besides, it wasn’t as if He had been absent when everything happened. He reminded me I had always been seen—even in the times I’d rather not have been. So I drudged it up from the depths of my darkness and brought it all before Him. The masturbation I struggled with, the pornography I’d steadily sought out after being exposed to so much so young. The power I enjoyed over men. The promiscuity. The lack of understanding about the difference between virginity and purity and how I’d waved a pompous flag of forged virginity for so long. I brought it all before Him and He slowly coaxed more out. With each confession I felt encouraged to bring more and more, and I spent months processing and surrendering low-lying sin even I had forgotten about.
At times I felt that at some point God’s grace was bound to wear out. But His Word proved to be true as He continued to wash me with forgiveness and mercy, and teach me about what sex meant to Him and how He desired the protection of my body and heart to righteously play out. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). I was forgiven, fully. I knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt. I learned that there may have been discipline and repercussion for my sin, but bringing it before God in humility was the only way to weed out the guilt and bondage to shame.
It was also liberating to learn that I was a daughter of God Almighty. I had struggled so much with feeling alone and like an orphan. I had a wonderful mother, of course, and family that loved me so deeply it hurt. But the aching thought never left me that my dad’s love for me wasn’t enough. That my own father’s love for me couldn’t change the outcome of the day he left us. And that I was an orphaned daughter who would never regain the love of a father now that my dad had chosen to end his story.
You can imagine how much it wrecked me when I came across verse after verse that reminded me how God actually saw me.
I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the LORD Almighty. (2 Cor. 6:18)
So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir. (Gal. 4:7)
Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. (Rom. 8:17)
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. (1 Pet. 2:9)
I was not a wandering orphan. I was not abandoned or alone. I may have been failed by my earthly father, but I had a heavenly Father who was eagerly waiting to welcome me home. Realizing I had been adopted by the Maker of the heavens and the earth put my earthly abandonment into perspective and helped heal a gaping hole in my scorned heart. I was not a wanderer. I was a daughter of the King.
Lastly, I became overwhelmingly aware that I was a purposed masterpiece. God gave me a great vision of our lives as mosaics, and reminded me that he was the Master Artist, refashioning us all. I will never forget the day He painted the most beautiful image of His handiwork in my mind: I saw my life as a child as a clean pane of glass, without blemish or scrape or flaw. When sin and brokenness and suffering entered my story, I watched the glass crack and shatter. The eating disorder, the suicide, the accident. All of the adversity and wreckage sent pieces crumbling. But then I saw God gather up the pieces and take them to a strong, stable workbench. I watched Him lay out the shards of my broken, fractured life, and begin to sift through them as if He had a vision in mind. One by one He picked up the pieces and slowly crafted them back together, but when He stepped away and revealed His work He hadn’t restored me into a clean pane like before. Instead, He had formed a beautiful mosaic that His light could shine through and reflect and refract to reach people and places it never could have before. The base of the mosaic was a foundation of sturdy truth. The glue that held the pieces together was a binding of forgiveness and grace. But the most beautiful thing about the entire masterpiece wasn’t just the color and light. It was the shape of the mosaic He had formed from all of my brokenness: it was the cross of Jesus Christ.
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10).
I knew, without a doubt, that God was doing good work in my life. And I, as His beautiful handiwork, was given the privilege of doing good work in response. We are masterpieces whom He has plans and purpose for. When we accept that blessing and responsibility, our lives become abundantly more meaningful.
God desires, above all else, for us to put Him first and to love Him fully, and for our hearts to be completely satisfied in and by His love. He desires for us to know our worth in Him so that we can fully love ourselves and be able to love others righteously. In wrecking our obsessions and inviting us into a place of blind trust, God is ultimately welcoming us to learn our identity in Him—and our worth.
He taught me, so clearly, the value of making sacrifices in order to identify myself with Christ, so I was excited when I felt Him peeling back another layer and calling for the next degree of trust. But even my excitement couldn’t have prepared me for the shock I felt when I learned where He intended that new journey to start. I was stunned when I realized He was clearly laying LSU football on my heart.
10
Wreck My Pride
All too often, we play it safe. We tend to be just courageous enough, in our own eyes, when there’s not too much at stake. We like to rationalize our more calculated public choices as careful moves to protect our purpose when, in actuality, we live in cautious timidity to protect our perception and pride. In a society where failure seems forbidden and risk is rarely encouraged if it seems to outweigh its reward, we’ve forgotten that we’re actually invited to live boldly in the name of Jesus. And that doing so can be outrageously fun. Messy, risky, and scary—yes. But gloriously fun. God knows our hearts, knows our passions, and knows the uniq
ue platforms and plans He has for each of us. Maybe rather than being afraid we’ll fall, it’s simply up to us to say yes and answer His call.
When God first whispered football, I couldn’t help but hesitate. His words had almost been audible that afternoon as I showered off the dirt and grime from my senior season’s soccer practice. I knew God desired me to live fearlessly and boldly, in faith, but I thought for sure I was misunderstanding what He was asking of me that day. My type-A personality was used to safe, calculated choices. I liked to know the outcome and count the cost. I liked to be sure my investment and time in an endeavor would be worth the reward, for my pride’s sake if nothing else. Apparently, God was adamant this had to change and was determined to wreck every ounce of pride and assurance I placed in my own strength.
I wasn’t sure how all the pieces were supposed to line up, but there was something about the thrill of saying yes to God and taking a leap of bold faith that excited me. If I wanted to practice what I preached and truly live boldly, navigating the idea was at least worth a try. After all, what was the worst that could happen? (Besides, you know, that I could be hit by a three-hundred-pound lineman and die.) When I got out of the shower I called my mom to explain what was on my mind. She playfully reminded me that as soon as I was flattened like a pancake after a bad snap I was going to regret that bold faith. But she never questioned my resolve. Nor did she doubt that such a radical challenge could have only come from God.
I knew my circumstances were unique. LSU soccer and football had always shared a weightlifting and indoor training facility, so I had been around the football staff and players for years. My particular affinity for strength training and my constant commitment to extra voluntary workouts on my own was well known around the facility. Football Ops was my second home. I had built relationships there and proven my work ethic, and was an All-American who garnered respect, particularly in my senior season. I was also six feet tall and close to two hundred pounds of muscle at the time. It was not as if I were an incoming freshman haphazardly deciding I wanted to try out for the football team. I was a groomed and disciplined athlete, and the football staff knew me. But even still, I wasn’t sure if they’d humor me, or even hear me out, as a woman seeing if I could work my way onto a man’s team.