I am as God created me.

This is the second time the Workbook gives me these exact words.

Apparently, once was not enough.

That makes sense. I can understand the idea in the morning and allow one uncomfortable interaction to recreate me by afternoon.

Someone questions my decision, and I become uncertain. I make a mistake, and I become incompetent. I see an unflattering photograph or notice another change in my body, and I become less acceptable.

The identity shifts quickly because I keep allowing temporary evidence to tell me what I am.

This lesson returns to something that does not shift. I am as God created me.

I recently caught my reflection while wearing shoes that revealed the part of my foot altered by surgery. For a moment, I did not see a whole person. I saw what was missing.

Nothing about my body had changed in that moment. What changed was the meaning I allowed the difference to carry.

The body tells a true story about what I have lived through. It can carry scars, losses, and visible evidence of change. But it cannot tell the entire truth about what God created.

I am not required to pretend the loss does not affect me. There are days when I feel self-conscious, vulnerable, or unlike the person I was before.

Those feelings deserve tenderness. They do not deserve authority over my identity.

God did not create me as a body that must remain unchanged to remain whole. God created something in me that no surgery, age, opinion, or mistake can revise.

I can look at the altered place without making it the definition of me. I can acknowledge what was lost while remembering what remains untouched.

The world may offer new descriptions all day. This lesson gives me one worth returning to.