You Are Chosen, Royal and Set Apart.

The other week, I spent a few hours one evening ironing name tags into Theo's school clothes. Twenty or so items. Trousers (pants, to you), jumpers, shirts, his bag.

Press the iron down for 10 seconds, wait for it to cool, repeat, move on to the next one.

Children here wear a uniform from the age of four in the UK, so everything he owns for the school week is almost identical to what two hundred other children are wearing.

The only thing in the world that tells his sweater apart is a small label on the collar with his name on it (well, that and the fact that it's almost always covered in pen, paint or food!)

There's a big bin in the playground for lost or unneeded uniform, and it's always full.

Sweaters left out on a field. Shirts outgrown between one term and the next. Bags of it donated when a family moves on.

And almost every piece in there still has a name in it. Someone sat where I was sitting, with an iron, doing exactly what I was doing, for every single item in that bin.

Most of what's in there has clearly been well looked after. Clean, folded, barely worn.

But there was one sweater that had seen better days.

Bobbled all over. Cuffs stretched out of shape from a year of somebody pulling the sleeves down over their hands. A hole at one elbow. Something orange down the front that had been through the wash a few times and won.

And the name was still in the collar. Ironed in just as firmly as every other one. Not faded, not peeling, perfectly readable. It was still somebody's.

Peter writes in 1 Peter 2:9, "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that you may proclaim the excellence of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light."

Chosen. Royal. Set apart.

Not one of those is something you worked your way into. Not one item in that bin ironed its own name in.

Yet I know how easily I believe the opposite.

That who I belong to is entirely dependent on my condition. That turning up bobbled and stained and torn at the elbow changes whose I am.

He chose you on your worst day with the same gladness as your best one.

He chose you before you'd done a single thing to earn it, which means there isn't a single thing you can do to lose it.

He chose you knowing the thoughts you'd never say out loud, the part of yourself you'd edit out if you could, the failure you're still carrying around from years ago.

He saw every bit of that, and still wrote His name on you.

You are not tolerated. You are not the spare, kept back in case something better comes along.

You are wanted. You are chosen, and then kept, and then loved so completely that He would rather come into the dark and find you Himself than leave you lost in it.

And it runs both ways. You carry His name, and He carries yours. Isaiah tells God's people, "Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands."

Engraved into the part of Himself He uses for everything, where He sees it every time He reaches for anything.

So whatever today asks of you, you can walk into it with nothing left to prove.

You don't have to be the best thing in the pile. You never did.

It's His name in your collar, pressed down deliberately by Someone who has no intention of ever letting you go. And His hands have your name on them.