Try something before you keep reading: think for a moment about the words you’d use to describe yourself. Maybe roles come to mind: daughter, wife, mother, professional. Maybe labels other people gave you: the strong one, the responsible one, the one who always helps, the one who didn’t make it, the one who failed, the difficult one. Maybe it’s simply how you feel today: tired, not enough, behind in life.

Now ask yourself something harder: how many of those words did God actually write, and how many were placed on you by the world, by your history, or by yourself, just trying to survive?

Most of us build our identity like a collage: a piece of what we achieved, a piece of what we were told as girls, a piece of how we compare ourselves to others, a piece of our worst moment that we decided to believe defines us. Over time, that collage starts to feel like the truth about who we are. And often we don’t even realize that God never signed off on any of those pieces.

The Bible starts somewhere else entirely, long before any achievement, comparison, or wound you’d later carry existed: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Before any role, any mistake, any hard season, a deeper truth about you already existed: you were made in the image of God. Not in the image of what you achieved. Not in the image of what someone said about you in a moment of anger or carelessness. In the image of God.

That doesn’t erase your story, it reframes it. You may have lived through rejection, comparison, abandonment, or things far harder than that, and still remain, at your core, that woman created in the image of God. The wound explains many of the labels you carry; it doesn’t have the authority to decide who you actually are.

There’s a verse I like to reread whenever I forget this: “He will rejoice over you with gladness, he will quiet you by his love, he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17). Think about that for a moment: God isn’t describing someone who has to earn her place there. He’s describing someone who already has it, and who on top of that is looked at with joy, not disappointment. That gaze doesn’t depend on your productivity, your marital status, how many children you have or don’t have, how your career is going, or whether you feel behind on something. It’s the gaze of a Father on his daughter, not a judge on an exam.

And still, I know that saying “I am loved, I am made in the image of God” can sometimes feel like a nice sentence that never quite makes it from the page to the heart. That’s honest too, and there’s no need to pretend otherwise. Identity doesn’t change overnight just because we read the right verse. It changes little by little, when we start noticing the labels that don’t come from God and decide, over and over, to stop living from them.

So if you want, try this sometime this week: identify a single label you’ve carried for a long time that you know, deep down, God never put on you; maybe it was a word from your childhood, a comparison, a disappointment, a voice that keeps repeating in your head. You don’t have to resolve it today. Just name it, and set it next to what God has already said about you. Not to deny what you feel, but to start remembering which of the two voices actually has the last word.

If something in you moved while reading this, don’t keep it to yourself: tell me about it in the comments below. Sometimes naming the label we carry out loud is the first step toward finally setting it down.

With love,

Yonasly