Extroverted?

Let me tell you, that's not what I was expecting from the Myers-Brigg Personality Test. As a child, I was always shy and very reserved. Calling anyone on the phone, and I mean anyone, was torture. I couldn't stand the possibility of being rejected. Walking over to my friend's house next door and knocking on the back door, waiting for her mother to arrive and say the fateful, "Sorry, Mel's busy," which was nearly always the case, (or at least to my young self it seemed that way), was almost too much for my desperate heart to take. All I hoped for was to be loved and treasured for who I was. Popularity wasn't what I was longing for; I just wanted love. The song Homemade that I shared in my last post sums up how I felt, and still feel somewhat to this day. However, in the last two years God has blessed me with way too many friends to count and I am grateful beyond words for each and every one of them. My heart still pines for love and even now I feel God filling me up so that I overflow with the love that only he gives. While I do have more friends than ever before, it's still a (nearly) daily struggle to initiate conversations with some of the people I interact with regularly, although when I really think on it, there's nothing to be scared of. God's been working on me BIG time in this area and I'm definitely changing, slowly but surely.

Thus I was amazed when I took the Myers-Brigg Personality Test on Thursday and my score showed me to have the personality type ESFJ. The F and the J made perfect sense in my mind, but the E and the S I wasn't so sure about, especially the E for Extrovert. I've taken the same test twice before, and both of those times my score showed that I was an I for Introvert, which I had always thought to be the case, but lately I've decided that perhaps I have become somewhat of an Extrovert. It's not that I'm afraid to converse with people. I just don't always know how to start talking, but once you get me going, usually I can hold my end of the conversation and I've always had a tendency to get lonely when I'm off by myself for too long. So it seems as if I'm leaving behind some of my Introvert tendencies and leaning towards being an Extrovert, which I'm totally lovin'!

Maybe I wasn't realizing before just how much God has changed me these past couple of years. He has set me free from unreasonable fears and given me peace about who I am. My hair's still messy, I have acne and the scars left from having lots of it in high school, I have thick eyebrows and tiny teeth, and there are girls skinnier than me, but all that doesn't matter. God made me who I am and I am who I am by his saving grace alone, which set me free from sin and made me holy!

Today I'm celebrating freedom in Christ. If you've been set free, you have a reason to praise because there's no longer condemnation! We have nothing to fear. God is for us, and he made each of us just the way he wanted for a specific purpose unique to each of us. And that's why I don't doubt personality changes or anything of the like anymore, because God is able to change us completely!

"Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think." -Ephesians 3:20