Undaunted by Christine CaineSample

We can allow the names we call ourselves to define us. We can allow the labels that others place on us to define us. After all, from the time we’re born, and then throughout life, our personal characteristics are often typed into boxes—on birth certificates, on driver’s licenses, job applications, marriage licenses, loan applications, and eventually on death certificates. We’re defined in little boxes on forms by our family of origin, address, education, experience, bank account, credit score, employer, friends, race, and ethnicity. We’re labeled one thing or another: educated or uneducated, responsible or reckless, qualified or inexperienced, young or old, shy or outgoing, too much or not enough. We can allow those words and labels to limit us. A teacher, parent, colleague, or ex can call us loser, fat, ugly, or hopeless, and those labels can stick to us, hurt us, and damage us because we begin to believe them. 

Remember that old adage from our childhoods “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me”? That thought may help us keep a resilient will and a stiff upper lip, but we know from experience it’s not a truthful statement, especially when it comes to our hearts. We can be hurt plenty by names: stupid, ignorant, alcoholic, addict, criminal, weak, pitiful. Names like these can break our spirits as much as sticks and stones can bruise and bloody our bodies, especially if we believe them and begin to use them on ourselves. They can bring us to our knees, stop us in our tracks before we even get started in life. Even when those names reveal something true about us, they are at best a partial truth, as well as a misleading one. If we allow them to loom larger in our hearts and minds than the promises of God, they can fool us into missing God’s truth about who we are and what we were created to do, so that we don’t pursue the purpose God has had in mind for us from the beginning of time. 

When there is a fight between our hearts and our heads, experience has taught me that the best thing we can do is pick up our Bible and remind ourselves of what God says. Our heads can insist that God created us and loves us, but our hearts and emotions may keep fighting against that knowledge with condemning punches like, What’s wrong with me? I never seem to do anything right! Those kinds of blows can give us an overwhelming sense of worthlessness and rejection, because that is what untruth about ourselves does. It beats us down and knocks us out. 

If we want to find peace, then we need to do what I did that day. We need to return to the truth of God’s Word that will last forever, not meditate on circumstances that will change and fade. It is this truth that enables us to move forward into the future undaunted. 

Adapted from Undaunted: Daring To Do All That God Calls You To Do by Christine Caine. Copyright © 2019 by Christine Caine. Reprinted with permission of Zondervan Publishing. All rights reserved.