Written by Rosamond Ennin of Brampton, ON (living in Belize)
All people want to be accepted and belong, but in our culture, that often means pressure to look and act like others. We easily forget the beauty of what it means to be rare.
To be rare means to be different, and it often comes with a cost. If you stand for something, it will not always be understood by everyone. But Jesus understands what it’s like to be rare, and thanks to His rarity we can now have salvation. He chose to go against the tide of popularity and stand with God the Father in righteousness and truth despite of what others around thought of Him.
Our world includes a powerful enemy whose goal is to steal, kill and to destroy. When you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour you become a new creation, and Satan’s desire is to steal your heart back.
When you made the decision to receive Christ in your heart, in the core of who you are, you still looked the same on the outside, but on the inside, a transformation had begun. It may not have been immediate but with time you notice that some of the things you did in the past, like swearing or stealing, you no longer do.
But if we aren’t careful, we can easily lose sight of the beauty of this rarity. Our eyes may begin to focus on “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). In other words, we can still get distracted by immediate human concerns and lose sight of eternal things.
There is a war for your rarity. It’s far more than your choice to stop swearing or stealing.
The enemy does not want any part of you to surrender to God. God desires for you to remain where He is so that He can complete what He has started in you (Philippians 1:6).
At the beginning of this year, the Holy Spirit gave me a simple instruction, “Preserve your rarity.” I didn’t really understand the depth of that instruction then, but I’ve seen its importance now. If you are not mindful and grateful for your rarity, you will give it up for the nickels and dimes of ordinary. But, “what good is it for someone to gain the whole [common] world yet forfeit his [rare] soul? (Mark 8:36)
