Category: Personal Growth

The stress of isolation.  Living in close proximity.  Extended time with the same people for days and weeks on end.  Being separated from support systems.  All of these things have the effect of revealing microscopic fractures in the self and in our relationships.  Like a building that seems to be structurally sound until an earthquake hits, the problems that were there all along don’t become evident until the building faces sustained rigorous shaking.  A marriage may have seemed stable and healthy but the added pressure of unpredictable finances and sharing close quarters may reveal disagreements, fears, and unhealthy dependencies that have been dormant, hidden, or purposely ignored.  For me, isolation has revealed relational insecurities that I thought I had addressed and conquered.  I find myself thinking that no one wants to hear anything I have to say, or that people think negative things about me, or that people don’t want me around.  The lack of in-person contact exposed the depth of the problem, and I became aware that there is more work to do.  I need to turn to God for help in taking captive all of the speculative thoughts that are not anchored in truth.  Stressful times reveal the continued need to check whether my dependency lies with Christ or in the opinions of others.

It is not a bad thing to depend on others.  In fact, we were created to be interdependent.  We are meant to operate as a body; many individual parts of one complete whole.  The support of others is a gift but will never completely fill us.  Also, our ability to provide support for others must always come from a source outside of ourselves.  The ultimate source of strength is always Christ.  He is the Living Water, the only source of our strength, identity, emotional and physical security, acceptance, courage, and hope.

Stress and difficulties can reveal that our security is in other things.  We may depend on things like financial security, affirmation of others, meaningful work, or the use of our abilities and talents.  These things are not bad, but the problem is making anything other than Christ the source of ultimate satisfaction.  When we turn to something other than God as the ultimate source of meeting our needs, we eventually experience pain and disappointment because there is no other source capable of meeting our deepest needs in a real and substantive way.  Quarantine is the perfect opportunity to address issues that have been ignored.  When our cracks are revealed we have two choices, we can either address the issues, or we can ignore them and allow the cracks to turn into gaping fissures and watch the whole building collapse.  We can use this opportunity to become proactive in seeking help and pursuing growth and healing.

Cracks shouldn’t come as a surprise. Cracks will always be present; they come with being human.  Dealing with new cracks is the ongoing condition of humanity which is why we need to be dependent on Christ rather than ourselves.  Only God can heal the cracks, and after those cracks are healed, be ready for the next set of cracks.  It’s an ongoing lifelong dependent relationship.

I work as a Para-educator teaching children to read, and we do something called a reading record where we listen to a child read a few pages of a book, and we mark all of the words that they miss.  I have a second grader who I have worked with for two years, whose name is Calvin.  He is a cute little blond boy with a round face and crooked teeth.

So one day I was doing a reading record on Calvin and he mispronounced the name Jose’.   He said “Josie.”  So I marked it wrong.  Calvin stopped and asked “Why did you mark that wrong?”  So I told him, “In Spanish the J is pronounce like an H.”   Calvin answered, “I don’t want to speak Spanish, I want to speak English and I read it the right way in English!”  He started crying.  He took off his little glasses and was trying to wipe away all of his tears. “Calvin, why are you crying, it’s OK to miss a few words, nothing is going to happen because of this test.  You don’t have to be perfect.” I told him.   He said “But I want to be perfect.”   I said “But Calvin no one is perfect, that’s impossible.  Do you know that adults don’t know all the words?  Did you know that when I’m reading, I come to words that I don’t know, and I have to learn new words?”  His eyes got big, and he said, “Adults don’t know all the words?” and I said “No, No one ever learns all the words, we are always still learning, no one is perfect.”  He sniffed, wiped his eyes, put his little glasses back on, and started reading again.

Somehow, at some point, Calvin came to believe the lie, that in order for him to be acceptable or “enough”, he had to know all the words.  For him to have value, for him to be “good enough”, he had to get everything right.  And we as Christians, can unconsciously believe this same lie, that in order for us to be acceptable, valuable, or “enough”, we have to get it all right.  We have to measure up.  We know cognitively, that we are “saved by grace”, but we often live as if God is happy with us when we get things right, and disappointed in us when we don’t get it right.  We live as if perfection is possible, and that if we could only achieve it, we would be acceptable.

In the following blog I want to offer just a couple of suggestions that might be helpful as you take on the task of leading children into a daily dependent walk with God.  I will post the first 3 points today and the last 3 points some other time.

1. We need to do our own inner work.

The main thing that you bring to the children that you lead, is the person that you are becoming.  The person that you are, is what will be reproduced.  I’m sure you’ve heard it said, “more is caught than taught”.  So it’s important that we do our own heart work.  We can’t give children something that we don’t have ourselves.  We need to know that our value comes from God’s unconditional love for us, not from the things that we do, or from the things that we have, or from what others think of us.  Our value is a gift from God, it can’t be earned, and it can’t be taken away.  We are at all times loved and accepted by God.  When we are secure in Christ, our hearts are full, and we have a storehouse of resources to pour into the hearts of those around us.

2. We must find our own value in God

A fullness and security in Christ begins with knowing our identity in Christ. What I mean by that, is that our value comes from God’s unconditional love for us, not from the things that we do, not from the things that we have, and not from what others think of us.  Our value is a gift from God, it can’t be earned, and it can’t be taken away.  We are at all times loved and accepted by God.  We are never more or less valuable than anyone else, so there is no need for comparison.  We are always “enough” in Christ, we don’t have to earn it or prove it, it’s just a fact.  We don’t need any other dependencies to fill us.  God meets our need for love.  He meets our need for acceptance, He meets our need for security, safety, significance.  He is the source of Life, and he completely fills us to over flowing, so that we can give out of our fullness.

So we need to ask ourselves “what am I looking to for my sense of worth, or my sense of being “enough”.  And then we need to do the hard work of transferring all of our dependencies to Christ.  We may look to relationships to meet our need for love, we may look to money and possessions for a sense of safety and security, we may look to our talents, success, career, positions, intelligence, or competence for our sense of value, or feeling like we are “enough.”  We need to recognize these things and transfer our dependency to God, and allow Him to meet all of our needs, and to be the Source of Life that he is meant to be for us.

Your kids will grow if they see you growing and transforming.  As you grow in security in Christ you will naturally become less judgmental, you will become offended less often, you will not be as easily angered, you will be able to apologize, and your children will be drawn to that.

The reason that we are easily offended is because we are insecure, and we need people to believe certain good things about us to feel like we are “enough,” and when they don’t it really hurts.  But when that need is met in Christ, we know we are enough regardless of what others think, and we free others to have their own thoughts and opinions.

When we get angry it is more often than not, about our self-concept, rather than what someone actually did to us.

Sometimes when we are insecure, we bolster our security by comparing ourselves to other people (my beliefs are better than theirs, I’m more talented than they are, I’m not as bad as they are).  Children learn by watching us.  If they see comparison, judgment, pride, and insecurity in our lives, they pick up on it.

Children are watching how we take correction and failure. They are learning from us about judgment and comparison, pride and insecurity.  And we are teaching them where to find their value.  As you grow in your understanding of who you are in Christ, He will transform your character into his likeness, and children will catch that from you.

3. We must teach children that their value is in God

We need to be careful what we are leading our children to believe about their identity.

Sometimes, we can accidentally teach our children, that their worth is found in their achievements.  We praise our kids for good report cards and for performing well in sports.  What we praise, teaches them what makes them valuable.  Ask yourself if you celebrate who your kids are, or what they have accomplished.  As Joby Martin puts it, we are un-gospeling our children when we lead them to believe that their worth is found in their achievements.

We need to gospel our children by calling out their God given identity in Christ.  We need to encourage them with the worth that is bestowed upon them as humans made in the image of God, not from the things they have done.  We need to be very careful not to invite our children onto the treadmill of performance.  We need to frequently remind our children, that their dignity and value are gifts that cannot be lost by a lack of talent, success or praise.

Have you ever had an experience where someone accused you of having poor motives when you felt sure that your motives were good?  You were positive that you did not intentionally determine to do anything with poor motives.  Did you ever realize later that they were right?

In an episode of Project Runway All Stars, a designer named Helen was asked to tell the judges about a dress that she had designed.  She said “I was more concerned with creating an actual textile.”   “I didn’t want to take the crafty route and just glue everything on to a muslin base.”  “There’s no way that purple or orange is going into this looking like a clown dress.”  “I felt like it would be a cop out to hot glue to muslin.”  (Camera pans to dresses on right and left that are orange and purple and have stuff glued to them).  One of the other designers whispers, ”Shaaaade.”  When they all go to the back room, no one moves to make room for Helen on the couch.  Someone says to Helen “You undermined everybody else to make yourself look better.”  Helen looks shocked and hurt.  She asks, “Why would I say anything rude about any of you people?”  Her emotion grows, she stands up and shouts almost in tears, “Like, why would I do that!?”  She walks away and then says in tears, “I respect all of you guys, the last thing I would want to do is offend anybody.”

It seems obvious by watching her reactions that she really didn’t think that her motives were to throw others under the bus; she really hadn’t intentionally set out to hurt or offend anyone.  But it is also very clear that she did make others look bad to make herself look good, and we all saw it.  So the question is how could she have done something so obviously devious and yet kind of not known that she was doing it.

I think it is because we don’t know our own motives (1 Cor. 4:4-5).  There are lies that we believe that we are not even aware of.  These beliefs shape our motives.  We act on them subconsciously and don’t even notice that we are doing it.  Our character is a mixture of good and bad and it can show itself without our purposeful decision to act.

Helen did say all of those things with wrong motives just like they said she did, but she didn’t consciously determine to hurt and discredit people; she wasn’t fully aware of her own motives.  Most likely, if she is at all introspective, she recognized that she did do something that was shady.  And ideally, even though she didn’t consciously intend to hurt anyone, she can take responsibility for the fact that she did hurt them.  And hopefully she was humble enough to apologize.

It really hurts to be accused of poor motives.  And it damages our pride to accept responsibility for things that we didn’t fully mean to do.  We need to have an accurate view of what it means to be human to be able to navigate tricky situations like this.  We need to understand that we are a mixture of good and bad; never only one or the other.  We are in a battle with evil and it deceives us with lies.  But we don’t have to be perfect to be acceptable to God.  We are at all times acceptable and “enough” even if we are not “good”.  This security in Christ frees us to be humble enough to recognize our faults and ask for forgiveness from others.  An ego that is secure in Christ has nothing to lose by admitting our faults.

The best thing we can do when someone points out that we hurt them is to acknowledge that we don’t know our own motivations and that sometimes we do things that we didn’t even know we were doing, and admit that we did hurt them, and take responsibility for the damage and apologize for the pain that we caused.

Another application of this is to go easy on others when they hurt us.  People do things and say things that hurt us, but they don’t necessarily do things to hurt us on purpose.  Allow people the freedom to be human.  Don’t villainize people for one mistake.  Seek reconciliation and growth rather, than retribution.

The goal of the Christian life is Christ-likeness; the transformation of our souls. We can’t solve our character issues by focusing on our behavior.  We have to look deeper and uncover the heart.  We have mixed motives and multiple motives for everything we do.  If we are going to uncover our unconscious belief system, it will require purposeful and honest introspection.  The transformation of our hearts will result in reflecting the character of the God who created us.

I wonder if sometimes we experience a painful event and we become very wounded by that specific event.  And I wonder if we have certain wounds that we use as a lens to evaluate every situation from that point forward.  Whenever something pokes that wound, we feel the pain all over again or we hear accusation as if it’s the first time.  We go for years and years or even decades of thinking that we are receiving the same message.  But what if we are really not?  What if our lens of pain is causing us to see things that are not there, or maybe to see things that were never even there in the first place?

I recently watched an episode of This Is Us where Kevin is in a therapy session and tells his family about the pain he felt as a child.  He felt like his brother was his mother’s favorite, and his sister was his father’s favorite.  And he had no one.  He felt like a fifth wheel.  He developed a voice in his head that repeated and said, “You are not enough”.  He tried to drown that voice out with things like football, acting, fame, and then when that didn’t work out, he tried to drown the pain in prescription drugs.

His mother admits that his brother was “easier” to love.  When we see Kevin’s childhood footage, we see that he did experience times that might feel like rejection.  But at the same time he was very loved. The truth was that he had thousands of experiences where his parents reached out to him in love.  But Kevin didn’t remember the love that he experienced, he only remembered the pain.  In the footage of his childhood we also saw how angry, jealous, mean and disrespectful Kevin behaved as a child and how difficult he made it for anyone to love him.  His rejection was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He believed everyone would reject him, so he was angry with them.  His anger came out in treating everyone poorly, and that made it harder for anyone to get close to him.  Also, he believed that he would see rejection, and so he noticed all of the things that could be construed as rejection.  And he failed to notice any of the ways that his family tried to love him.

I wonder if we do this too. One bad experience is used to color everything.  We let our feelings tell us what people must have done to us.  Everyone has their lens that they see things through to interpret events in our lives.  And everyone has feelings that are a result of that interpretation.  I wonder if we could be more open to checking to see if we are seeing things with clear vision.

I wonder if my parents were as neglectful as I experienced them to be.  I wonder if there were hundreds of happy and loving interactions that I just don’t have any memory of.

Early in our marriage John pointed out little mistakes of mine, like forgetting to turn the lights off or hanging the toilet paper the wrong way.  But he learned to have more grace and he stopped pointing out small things.  But those comments had already hurt me.  I felt like he expected perfection and that he was always judging me.

But now as I look back I remember hearing John’s angry voice ringing in my ears each time I made a little mistake, and I would feel more hurt, judged, and angry, even though he had never said one word about those issues for 15 years.  He wasn’t judging me, or saying anything, or even thinking anything.  I was taking something that happened 15 years prior and allowing it to control my thoughts and feelings in the present.  I don’t think he even judged me when he first brought up those things early in our marriage.  But it hurt, so I thought he “hurt” me, and it lodged itself deep.

Sometimes I share an opinion with John and I am not asking him to agree with me, or do anything, I’m just sharing what I think, and the way he reacts, makes me think he is feeling something that is a reaction to something much deeper than what I just shared.  Could he be believing that I am thinking things about him that I’m not even thinking? Could he be hearing accusations where there are none?

I wonder if we all imagine people saying things that they never said.

“I don’t care about you”

“You are stupid”

“You are not good at your job”

“You have to be perfect”

“I don’t love you”

“You are a burden”

“You are not worthwhile”

And we become hurt over and over even though no one is hurting us.  Maybe it’s our own voice yelling inside our head or some voice from the past but not this person.

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached.  People with amputated limbs will sometimes feel pain in the limb that does not even exist.  I think we carry phantom wounds deep inside.   We feel hurt and we believe that someone is hurting us, but if we look more closely, they aren’t.  The pain is real, but it is coming from a phantom wound.

Sometimes, the reason that it is hard to get along with others, is that we believe things should be done a certain way. We give almost moral weight to doing things the way that we think are the “right” or “wrong” way, when they are not “wrong” and “right” ways, but different ways.  Getting along with others requires a willingness to give up our personal preferences and desires.  There is nothing wrong with sharing a personal preference.  We can have opinions and even ask for what we want.  The problem is when we let our desires become demands.  If we are getting angry, then we know our desire has become a demand.  Also, when we want things our way too often, we become difficult to get along with.  We need to be able to hold our preferences with an open hand.  This requires the ability to accept and respect the way other people do things, even if they are not our way.

A perfectionist is someone who becomes obsessed with relatively trivial matters.  They declare these matters to be moral (right or wrong), when they are not.  They make trivial matters of utmost importance.  They allow these things to become more important than the relationship, and cause division between people.  They give criticism and withhold praise when things are not perfect.  They are willing to get angry and argue about small issues.

A perfectionist also holds themselves to an impossibly high moral standard, and judges themselves harshly for not achieving perfection.  They also sometimes see themselves as less flawed than they actually are, because it is too scary to admit to themselves that they are not perfect.  Perfectionism gives a false sense of value, and false sense of pride.

The root cause of perfectionism is a belief that your worth is determined by the opinion of others, and by what you accomplish, and fail to accomplish.  They believe that they gain or lose value based on their behavior.  A perfectionist has too low of an opinion of himself because he has normal human limitations and fails to be perfect.  But he is also prideful in his ability to maintain stricter criteria than other humans.

The cure for perfectionism is to accept yourself as a human being with human limits and human vulnerabilities to mistakes and criticisms.

The way you see yourself affects the way you treat others, because we evaluate others using the same criteria we use for ourselves.  Your value does not come from being perfect.  Remember that when you make a mistake, it does not need to threaten your value.  Learn to be comfortable with mistakes and imperfection.  Have compassion for yourself instead of getting angry with yourself.  This will lead to having more patience and compassion for others.

Strive to be perfectly human (dependent on God) instead of being perfect.  In other words, know your identity.

Most people look to their skills, accomplishments, status, and or appearance for their identity.  Identity is very tied to self-acceptance, self-worth, self-image, and self-esteem.  It is all “how I view myself”.  People use these things as a source of being “ok” with yourself, feeling like you are “enough”, feeling confident and secure, liking yourself.  When we get our identity from things about us, it leads to either pride or self-hatred/low self-esteem.  We need to discover our God given identity and gain our self-acceptance from the only true source of our worth.

Who are you? What is your Identity? You are God’s prized creation.  You possess dignity. You are worthy of respect.  You are worthy of high esteem. You are God’s chosen and adopted child.  You are a loved son or a loved daughter.  You are a citizen of heaven.  You are God’s heir.  You are worth dying for. You are worth saving.  You are worth loving every day of eternity.

3 Biblical Truths:

1.We are only valuable because of God’s love. We are not valuable because of looks, talents, or anything that we do.  God’s love is the only thing that makes us valuable.  This truth leads us to humility as we realize our need for dependence on God rather than ourselves.  We are incapable of earning our own value.

2.We are completely valuable because of God’s love. God’s love actually makes us worthy of respect and high esteem.  This truth leads us to a very positive self-image, but not in a prideful way, because it is based on what God has done not what we have done.  We receive our value as a gift, not something we can earn.  This gift is unconditional; it can’t be earned or lost by our behavior.  We can be confident and secure in our value as a person at all times because of God’s love.

3.We can never be more or less valuable than anyone else.  There is no room for comparison.  God decides who is valuable, not us, and not the world.  And God said everyone has value, so everyone does. God says that every single one of us is important, valuable and needed, and no one is any more or less valuable than anyone else. God gave us value and we should not let anyone take it away.  We need to decide to be secure in His love for us.  And we should never treat someone else like they are less valuable than us, because that would be like stealing away from them the value that God gave them.

Sometimes when people tell us that we have hurt them, we become angry and defensive.  We don’t want to take on more blame than we deserve.  We find a way to turn the blame back on them.  We blame them for hurting us.  But the truth is the pain that we feel comes from our own realization of being sinners, and not wanting to be a sinner because we must protect our view of ourselves.  We want to see ourselves in a good light.  Admitting being a sinner is admitting failure.  It is survival, we must protect our view of ourselves because if we are not good people even though we try to be, we are a failure at life.  We don’t want to admit that we have faults, because then we can’t evaluate ourselves as a good person. We need to see ourselves as a good person because self-worth is based on seeing yourself in a good light.  Self-esteem is liking yourself, and you can’t like yourself if you are not a good person.

But the truth is, we are not good. Our sin nature is not likable and we can’t get rid of it.  But our sin nature is not us.  Our true self is our spirit which is redeemed by God and it is only “good” because Christ has redeemed it, not because of our own success.  We ourselves could never be good.  But we can love our redeemed selves, not because of goodness but because of gratefulness to God with humility.  We can love our “self” that is clean and redeemed by God. But we still have to fully own (admit to) our sinfulness; it is a part of us.  The fact that we are still sinners does not have to threaten our love/acceptance of ourselves; we can love ourselves the exact way that God does.  He loves us even in our sin because we are worth it not because of righteous things we have done but because of his grace.  We can love ourselves in spite of our sinfulness because we have been redeemed.  This is a humble love for ourselves because we did not earn our lovableness, God provided our value by his choice to love us. When we try to love ourselves because we are so good it is based on a lie, a false evaluation of ourselves, because no one is good even on their best days.  Goodness is not achievable, so if goodness is the indicator of self-like, no one can every really like themselves legitimately because we are sinners and will continue to sin until death.  We need to have a healthy love and acceptance of ourselves based on what God has done, not what we have done.  And we need to fully accept that we are not only sinners, but we are responsible for each and every one of our sinful thoughts and actions, and we need to hold ourselves responsible for our sin rather than deny that it exists.

“A complete knowing of our self in relation to God requires knowing our self as deeply loved by God, our self as deeply sinful, and our self as in a process of being redeemed and restored.”  “A genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcome parts of self.”  David Benner

When we recognize that we don’t need to be “good” to be a valuable person, we are free to accept ourselves, the good, bad, and the ugly.  We can acknowledge our shortcomings and not be so threatened.  We can listen to the feelings of others and actually care about how they feel and apologize when necessary, even when we ourselves are in pain.  When we know our true identity in Christ, we become secure.  We become strong enough to hear painful things about ourselves.  And we become strong enough to care about others in spite of the pain.