True You: Finding Beauty In Authenticityनमुना

Lies

God is truth and knows the truth about us. We have no reason to hide or be ashamed of our lives or the things we've done, seen, or experienced. God loves us through and through. 

Life has this interesting way of allowing the lies about us to be the thing that rules us rather than the truth of who we are. At the core of who we are, there is beauty and stunning truth that was placed in us by God. Sadly, that gets lost through the passage of time and lived experience. We need to be reminded to separate the truth from the lies that try and keep us bound up and render us paralyzed.

Have you ever found yourself believing things about yourself? Things that people have spoken over you or to you. Words that have been thrown carelessly in your direction but have landed on the fertile soil of your soul? 

I remember picking my daughter up from school one day when she was twelve years old. A boy in her class had told her she was so ugly that people would die when they looked at her. On the car ride home from school, she sobbed as she told me about her experience and how it made her feel. I stopped the car, held her face in my hands, and asked a few pertinent questions. 

“When you look at people, do they die?” 

“No,” she said.

“Are you ugly?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

“What do your dad and I tell you about you and your beauty?”

“That I'm beautiful, and I was created exactly how God wanted me to be, and I'm no mistake,” she said.

“That's exactly right,” I told her. “So let's separate the truth from the lie. You're looking at me, and I'm not dead. The truth is people don't die when you look at them. God created you filled with beauty and kindness—not ugliness. The truth is you are all together lovely. Now take the lies that boy said to you, wrap them up in a ball, and throw them out the window. You, my girl, must stand in the truth of who God and your parents say you are.”

With that, I rolled down the window, and my courageous twelve-year-old threw that ball of lies out the window and didn't allow the careless words of a boy to become her inner narrative. 

We need to separate the truth from the lies that we've believed. We need to speak them out, acknowledge them, and then replace that narrative with truth of the beauty of who we are, so that we may live wholeheartedly and love more deeply.