Choose Different
We had just moved, and for Mother’s Day, my kids bought me some beautiful flowers. My daughter took the roses and placed them in a charming vase and carried it over to the sink to add some water. When she did, this seemingly fine vessel began to burst, spewing water everywhere. The bottom of the vase completely broke off! We didn’t realize it had cracked on the inside during the move. It looked fine, but it wasn’t. You see, something that is broken from the inside cannot hold weighty things. It can look pretty, but it cannot be useful! You can look fine and not be fine. You can fake it through life but then break under the mildest pressure.
So often we are broken on the inside from an immature perspective of ourselves. As someone who has walked through extensive seasons of healing, bringing me into wholeness (and trust me, I haven’t arrived), I have a new perspective! I have a redeemed perspective. I have a perspective that is spiritually mature, and it started with my thinking.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
1 Corinthians 13:11 (ESV)
I have a choice in how I speak, think and reason. It doesn’t change anything that happened to me, how I’ve felt or how I’ve responded, but it can change who I am today. So much of how we see ourselves is shaped by our first eighteen years of life, but we get to decide who we become. Too many of us are walking around forty years old but feeling fifteen inside. You may be fifty, but when someone at work says something to you, it triggers shameful memories from when you were nine, causing you to retaliate or retreat.
For years, I would look in the mirror and think I was ugly, unwanted, overweight, dumb….you name it and I thought it. Anyone that knows me would completely laugh at any of these notions, but for me, it was so real for so long. Still today, I have the choice to believe those lies that I nurtured for so long, or I can realize that the enemy manipulated circumstances in my youth and deceived my impressionable heart.
Even today, I can effortlessly accept that I’m not lovable or I can choose to remember who I am! I’m a Gonzales. For more than half my life, I have been loved by my affectionate husband, who pursues me still and tells me every day that I’m beautiful and wanted. More importantly, I am deeply loved by God as His beloved daughter. He gave everything for me just as He gave everything to display His love for you. No matter your situation, you have a choice in where you will root your identity. I now choose to look to God to clearly see me. I may have played into ugly lies from my past at one time, but I don’t AND I WON’T watch those tired reruns anymore! The choice is yours, choose wisely friend! I promise, it’s worth the effort it takes to change narrative.
You can do it!
Celeste
