Tailor Made

IOW quote for January 25, 2008


But remember, for all your adult life you'll be a woman. And how you live your life as a woman, all by yourself before God, is what makes the real you. Nothing on the exterior can touch or change that precious inner sanctuary, your heart, his dwelling place unless you let it. And God, who loves you very much has tailor made all your outer life, your circumstances, your relationships, to pressure you into becoming that beautiful woman he's planned for you to be."~ Anne Ortlund


Years ago growing up in the sixties at the age of around 10 I had made up my mind that I didn’t like being a girl. It all stemmed from what I saw going on with the women’s liberation movement at the time. Being a girl meant one day I was going to be a woman. Duh! But for some reason I thought I was going to have to be like these women involved in this current movement. To me it was more appealing to grow up to be my favorite animal, which was a monkey than a woman.

Now that I’ve made it to womanhood and have been here for a few years….awe, awe, awe… no comments from the readership gallery. Okay I’ve been here for “several” years! Does that make you happy? It does me because I found I was more than happy to be a woman. There were good things about it that I wasn’t’ seeing in the sixties. No one made me grow up to be like someone I wasn’t meant to be. How I lived my life as a woman, by myself with the Lord’s help did the trick.

It’s important that we don’t allow the things on the outside to become inside factors getting to that inner sanctuary where only Christ should be allowed to live. During a time period when my marital struggles were at their highest I found out I was wearing my spiritual clothing inside out. I was trying to get dressed from the outside in instead of the inside out. It didn’t work just like trying to wear a pair of pants inside out they just don’t fit.

What we need to be doing is paying attention to our Tailor, our Lord and Savior. The one who indeed knows what He’s doing. He sees the end design of something that we can’t possibly picture in our minds. Like trying to tailor fit a skirt on a child that won’t stand still long enough to let us put the pins where they need to be, we wind up getting stuck. Not to the fault of the tailor but to the impatient one being fitted. It’s time to be patient. It’s time to put our trust in our Tailor, Jesus Christ.

CLOSING THOUGHT: It’s hard to believe sometimes that the things going on around us are there to mold us into what God sees that we can be. We’d like to argue the fact that we didn’t need to go through medical problems, marital struggles, and financial difficulties to be molded into a beautiful woman, after all our altering job can’t be all that bad. We’re smart enough to know where the pens need to go, the material needs to be snipped to do the trick.

Wrong! If you’ve ever seen me try to alter something you’d know what I mean. Whether we are good at it or bad we need to leave the designing to the main Tailor the one with the pattern in His hands. The one who cares about the end results more than we ever could.

Let us not be like the Israelites spoken of in Ezekiel 16:14, 15 when God said to them, “And your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, because the splendor I had given you made your beauty perfect, declares the Sovereign LORD. 'But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute. You lavished your favors on anyone who passed by and your beauty became his.”

We need to trust in the one that can make us beautiful from the inside out not in our beauty itself. Using what He has designed to serve and glorify His kingdom. Showing off the glamour of His splendor at work in our lives as we live as a witness for Him. Tailor made, designed in Heaven, displayed on earth.


Our host this week is Elisa over at, Extravagant Grace. Wonder over there and join the fun of reading and sharing what others have to share about today’s quote. Praise the Lord we can all be beautiful through the eyes of God, we just need to sit still and allow the Tailor to work in our lives and stop fighting the pens that occasional stick us.