You Are Not a Mistake.

I really don't like it when people describe their child as a "happy accident." Or "a surprise."

And I flinch when anyone, even joking, calls a child "a mistake."

Even the gentler word, "unplanned," sits a little uneasy with me, because a phrase like that has a way of settling over a person and setting a tone before they have had the chance to be anything at all.

Words like that stick. Said once at a family dinner, said with a laugh, said in a moment of frustration, they have a way of burrowing in and staying for years. A child can grow up carrying the quiet sense that their existence was an inconvenience, a slip, something that wasn't supposed to happen.

And I know that some of you reading this were told exactly that. Maybe it was a joke you were never quite in on. Maybe it was said in anger and never taken back. Or maybe no one ever said it out loud, but you pieced it together from the way things felt, and somewhere deep down you have believed it about yourself ever since.

And maybe none of that was ever your story. Maybe you were wanted, prayed for, celebrated, the answer to years of longing, and you still feel like a mistake anyway.

The feeling doesn't always come from something someone said. Sometimes it grows quietly out of your own failures, out of comparisons that never go your way, out of the sense that you don't quite fit anywhere.

Whether the word was spoken over you or you arrived at it all on your own, the ache is the same. And so is the answer.

So I want you to hear something today. You may have been unplanned by the people around you. You were never, not for one second, unplanned by God.

Long before anyone counted you as a surprise, God spoke these words over Jeremiah: "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you."

Knew you. Not noticed you once you finally showed up. Knew you, before there was even a body to know.

Your timing may have caught your family off guard. It never caught God off guard. He was not scrambling to make room for you, or working out what to do with an arrival He hadn't expected.

He had already written you in. The same hands that hung the stars decided this world needed someone exactly like you in it.

Feeling like a mistake and being one are not the same thing. God does not make mistakes, and you are not the exception to that rule.

So if that old word is still hanging over you, let today be the day you set it down.

You are not an accident. You are not a happy accident. You are not a mistake.

You are known, you are chosen, and you were wanted before you ever drew a single breath.

Whatever you were once called, hear what He calls you now. His.