Awaken a Better YouSample

Step 2: Information

For decades, I lived with the ongoing desperation of unresolved personal and communal trauma. I couldn’t move past it because I didn’t have the right information to understand the brain or know what could help me heal.

Whether it’s trauma or something else in your life that needs healing, the second step to transformation is information. Gathering information means researching the problem and unlearning built-in ideas.

It also means seeking experienced mentors who can cut through the chatter and speak with authority from personal experience. Scripture reminds us that there’s safety in a multitude of counselors (Proverbs 11:14).

Remember, though, that on your quest for information, many people will seek to give you advice, but not everyone has the right to do so. Nobody sees everything except you and your Creator. Be careful of advice that lines up with how someone sees you to be rather than who God created you to be.

Think of how Satan manipulated Adam and Eve. He told them “You can be like God,” which sounds enticing until you realize they already were like God. They were literally made in God’s image.

Satan convinced Adam and Eve that they needed him in order to achieve something that God had already accomplished. In other words, he was giving them the wrong information about themselves and their place in the world.

When you take the time to know yourself and have accurate information—when you see yourself as your Creator sees you—then everything changes. You may think you’re

• just a woman,
• just a minority,
• just a single parent,
• just an immigrant,
• just a high school dropout, or
• just another Black man in America.

If that’s what you think, then it could be you’ll never be more than that. But the word just is a lie. You’re not “just” anything.

God made and named you who you are for a reason; your name is not derived from how others label you, but from who you are purposed to be. Ask God: “What is my name that supersedes how people see me and expect me to function?” That’s the most important information you will ever have about yourself.

In what ways have you allowed others to dictate your identity, particularly related to the desperate situation you identified in the previous reading?