Do you know yourself—how you are put together? Your strengths and weaknesses? Or have you absorbed a script for your life written by others or by circumstances similar to the examples below?

• Financial success is an important measure of success in your family, but you have always wanted to find a small homestead and try to live off the grid.
• You’ve always admired strong leaders—team captains, school presidents, CEOs—and work to emulate them, but your husband sadly informs you that the stress you are under has made the woman he married disappear, and he wants you back.
• Your life hasn’t turned out the way you dreamed, and sometimes you just want to run away. Is that the only solution or can you be the person God created in the life you have?

Are you a lamb trying to be a lion? A Martha trying to be a Mary? A Pinocchio pretending to be a real boy?

God wants you to grow into the design he created. And God wants you to grow so you can paint a picture, make meals for the hungry, chair a committee, build houses for the homeless, perform life-saving surgery, raise a family, or make others laugh. You can affect others around you in the way God designed for you. If you don’t, the rest of us miss out on the gift you were meant to give.

How do we grow? What shapes your physical body? The way you eat, drink, sleep, exercise, heal, and live. Whether you work at it or ignore it, your body shows the effects.

The inner you also shows the effects of the attention it receives. What shapes the inner you? What you see, read, hear, think, and do. This is spiritual formation—and it’s not an optional activity reserved for ministers or monks. Every one of us is in the process of being shaped—for better or for worse.