Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. (Rom. 12:2)
Every person has a story. Every one of us has encountered trials, challenges, joys and victories in our lives that have helped to shape who we are and how we operate in this present moment. But who we are and how we operate is not always one and the same. This year, God has pulled the lid off of some things that have been a part of my life that I assumed were a part of my personality. Things like anxiety and excessive worrying, masqueraded themselves as being cautious and pensive. Perfectionism wore the mask of being detail-oriented and organized. Shame disguised itself as conviction and a desire for holiness. But layer by layer, God is uncovering the truth behind the facade. And the truth is that some of these things that have pretended to be a part of my identity are really only coping mechanisms and defenses I have used to keep myself protected in a world that is broken.
As I write and as I allow God to use me to do ministry, I do it from the messages God is actively writing on my heart. But it is not always easy to be vulnerable and transparent. Sometimes we get the idea that we can only lead out of our strength. We get the impression that we can only talk about the battles we’ve already won and the areas where we’ve already seen the victory. Somehow talking about our weaknesses gets a bad rap. What if people see that I still struggle with things? Will I be disqualified? What if I don’t have all the answers? What then? But the truth is when we lead in our vulnerability and have the courage to open up the areas of ourselves where we are still in process, we strengthen one another. We acknowledge the realities of living in a world where brokenness still exists. We say with our lives, yes there will be struggles. Yes there will be hard times. Yes there will be areas of pain and confusion. BUT, the God I serve is bigger than the struggle. He’s bigger than my fear. He’s bigger than the insecurity and the doubt. And He loves me enough to enter the parts of me that are fragile, that are vulnerable, that feel exposed and that need healing. And when we open ourselves up to God and to each other, when we allow God to expose our weaknesses, He makes a display out of His redemption and restoration in our lives. And guess what? Our personal healing is no longer personal. It’s contagious and it touches everyone our lives influence. And for this reason I choose to be transparent.
So, I’ll be the first to admit that there are some days I walk through, where the lies of the enemy still feel true. However, I am learning that my feelings have little to do with reality. Feelings can be forged by past trauma. Feelings can be formed by old wounds. Feelings could sprout from well-meaning people in my life that have misrepresented a piece of God’s nature to me. And the thing about feelings is that they feel true. But the truth and our feelings are not the same thing.
I am learning to acknowledge my feelings in a way that causes me to hunt for the truth. I am learning not to avoid my feelings and to pay attention to them, because my feelings are a signal light. When I feel like I’m not enough, a signal light goes off in my soul. That signal light beckons me to pull over and to dial up Jesus. Holy Spirit, what lie am I believing that is causing me to feel like I am not good enough? Lead me into the truth, so that I can see myself the way you see me.
Some of us get discouraged because we feel like we are dialing up the Lord on the same issues over and over again. No sooner have we made peace with something and then the same lie hits us again, in a different context. What do you then? The same thing. We sit down with the same truths. We meditate on them and allow Jesus to walk us through it. As we do this time after time, we are literally rewiring our minds to think the way God thinks. We are training our minds to follow a new pathway, so that when the lie hits, despite how we feel, our response is to hunt down the truth. And the more we hunt down the truth, the more our feelings get transformed in the process.
We cannot allow ourselves to give into the lie that tells us that our hang ups are a life sentence. We simply cannot afford to believe that just because we have been through some things that have damaged us that our wounds are a life sentence. We do not have to believe that some things we just have to live with. We take every feeling, every lie, and every partial truth to the foot of the cross. We expose the most vulnerable places of our hearts to the Lord and the people He has put in our lives to love us through it. We don’t ever stop pursuing truth. Because when you find the truth, you find your freedom.
For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Cor. 3:17)
