The first time someone in my new found church family called me that, I wasn’t sure whether to smile or grimace. I knew it was intended to make me feel loved and cared for in my newness, but I felt about the same way I felt years ago when my mother-in-law-to-be told my husband that she thought I was sweet. I wasn’t altogether sure I could stick to the script.

I was most definitely knew to Christianity, but at nearly 60 years of age, I was in no way as “fresh” as a newborn human. This “baby” was born again, to be sure, but I carried years of being who I was. Years of habits, ways of acting and reacting, and years of “Dani-ness” that I was pretty sure had not been washed away in the baptismal waters.

At that point, I wasn’t sure I wanted them to be.

After all, hadn’t God made me and shaped me even when I wasn’t aware of it? I felt like the awkwardly-shaped lump of clay sitting on a master’s table, looking for a new and more wonderful shape, but the potter׳s hands had been hard at work for a long time, so there was something, or rather someone, very much there.