Known Before I Was Formed

Known Before I Was Formed

By Sherita Jones | The Anointing Grace

"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee" (Jeremiah 1:5, KJV).

That word "knew" is not casual. In the Hebrew it is “yada”, a knowing that is intimate, relational, complete. Not a glance. Not a passing awareness. God did not simply foresee me. He knew me, fully, before He ever shaped me in my mother's womb.

So I have to ask myself a hard question: if He knew me that intimately before I was formed, then who is the woman I have been calling myself for all these years?

Because she is not the same woman.

The girl who learned to survive because no one protected her. The woman who measured her worth by how she was treated. The one who carries fear like it's part of her name, who wears shame like it was issued to her at birth. That woman was shaped by what happened to me. She was not shaped by what God said about me.

Abandonment did not form me. Neglect did not form me. Trauma did not form me. Those things happened to me. They left marks. But they are not the blueprint. God is the blueprint, and He does not build broken things and call it finished.

He formed me in His image. Not in survival mode. Not in fear. In His image.

So there is a version of me I have not fully met yet. She existed in His heart before pain ever had a chance to introduce itself to me. She is not something I have to become. She is not a self-improvement project. She is who I already am underneath everything that was placed on top of me by things I never chose and people who never should have touched my life.

I don't know her completely yet. I have spent most of my life knowing the version pain built. But healing is not God creating someone new. Healing is God removing what was never supposed to be there in the first place. Layer by layer. Lie by lie. Wound by wound. Not addition. Excavation.

This is what I want women reading this to understand: you are not disqualified from your true identity because of what was done to you. What happened to you is real, and it mattered, and it left wounds worth naming. But it does not get the final word on who you are. God already spoke that word before you were formed. Everything else has just been noise trying to drown it out.

I am still walking this out. I have not arrived at her fully. But I know she trusts instead of fears. She rests instead of strives. She knows whose she is, so she is no longer negotiating for her worth.

And every layer God removes brings me one step closer to the woman He knew before I ever took a breath.