Do you feel you have reached an unplanned bus stop in your life and cannot seem to seem to find the way ahead. We have all been there on several occasions and will probably still get there again at some point. I hope this 3-part series of posts will help you find your way again

PART 1 – BEING FOUND IN HIM 1 (PHIL 3:1-9)
A few years ago during the annual performance appraisal window of ABC Ltd, Tayo was informed that she had been awarded a C-Grade for her performance in the previous year. The C-grade was No 4 on the 5-Point scale this organisation used to measure performance. Receiving this score meant that Tayo needed to improve on a number of important areas before she could be considered as fully meeting the standards of her job.
Tayo was very upset and felt she had been unfairly treated considering how much of herself she had invested in serving her organisation over the years and the amount of work that she had done during the year in question. Furthermore, in her career of over a decade, she had consistently been considered a strong performer even when doing work beyond what you might expect from someone at her level To make matters worse she compared herself to colleagues who had received far higher scores and could not understand why there were labelled high performers and she was labelled a low performer.
At ABC Ltd, the Annual Performance score was a very important part of company life. It defined how well employees were paid, what sort of training they received, what type of projects they would be assigned etc. The score pretty much determined who they were within XYZ Corp for the next 12 months. For the first time in her professional career Tayo knew the feeling of being tagged as a low-performer. This was a totally new experience for her and it almost felt like being raped.
Are you at a point in your life where you can identify with this feeling of being unappreciated and undervalued, either at home, at work, or perhaps at church? Do you feel that all the effort you are putting into that project or into ensuring the success of that relationship is receiving little or no reward? Do you feel that you are being wrongly perceived by people; placed in a box with a label that doesn’t belong to you? Well, whether these perceptions or labels are accurate or not, you have the choice of being defined by them, or by the things that truly matter, your life in Christ.
In Phil 3:9, Paul speaks of finding an identity in Christ that is not dependent on the “right” things I have done, rather it depends on the finished work of Christ. We can take comfort that regardless of whatever external labels that are put upon us, the true identifier is who we are in Christ Jesus. We are FOUND in Christ Jesus, not in the various boxes that life seeks to put us in…rich, poor, smart, dumb, pretty, plain…none of these are the reality of who we are. We can be found only in Jesus Christ. Identifying ourselves any other way, is not reality and will lead ultimately to failure in this life and in the life to come.

Lord, help me to remember always that only in you am
I found. Seeking to identify myself by the labels the world
places will only lead to heart-ache. I only wan to be found
in you, defined by your righteousness and all you have done