Love can't be earned….it is given.

So…this past week God has turned over tables and revealed a major lie that I had been believing.

I wrote a blog a while back about grace and how hard it was for me to understand grace.  The fact that it can't be earned always has boggled me.  Then, I won a car and God used that car to help me understand his grace a little more.  If you haven't read it…check it out here. 

So, this whole time I've been trying to work this out with my relationship with God.  Yet, it was revealed I had been believing similar lies when it came to relating to people.

I've had a lot of friendship problems in my life.  I would get a friend and then we would fight and no matter how hard I tried we would seem to not ever be the same again.  There was a season of my life where just about every friend and I had broken up and I didn't know what was wrong.  Every situation was different, and every fight was different.  Yet, the only common denominator was me.  It was then I started believing how much of an awful friend I was.

I also would let my friends blame me, because if I was such a bad friend then I must have done something wrong.

To this day, I would never mind taking the blame because I'm so hard on myself anyway that one more negative thought about myself isn't going to hurt right?

Then, I started dating this guy.  I wasn't the most perfect girlfriend, but I tried a lot of things to be a good girlfriend.  I wrote him notes, gave him gifts and spent as much time with him as I could.  I was forgiving and loving.  Yet, the only reason why I did have these things was because I was trying to earn his love. I had made lots of mistakes in the relationship and so I would try to earn his forgiveness or earn his love by doing all these things.

Yet, even after all this He didn't love me.  So, we broke up.

After, the break-up we had a heart to heart in which I confessed that I blame myself…just like I had always blamed myself before.  I told him that it was easier to blame myself and just believe that I could have done more and should've done more rather than believe that it was his fault and that he just didn't love me.

Then, he did an amazing thing.  He told me that I couldn't earn love, but instead love is given.

It's not my loss that he didn't love me or forgive me, it's his loss!!

That statement has sense reverberated in my mind as I play through the years of my friendships and realize I was trying to earn their love the whole time and that's why in the end I had always seen it as my fault.

I remember standing outside someones door with a bucket of ice-cream trying to earn their forgiveness.
Asking for forgiveness but nothing changed.

Nothing that I did changed the way things ended.  Yet, love is not about what is done, it's about the heart of the matter.

If they don't forgive me, it's on them.  Not me!! It's not about what I did, it's about what they didn't do.

I know this may sound harsh, but I'm tired of taking the blame for things that aren't my fault.   I know I'm not perfect and there are things I can work on but I can't earn their forgiveness and I'm tired of trying.

Love is a gift and that's why I'm so thankful for my roommates now.  For even though, I don't always clean my room or keep quiet while they are studying.  They have chosen to love me, and that gift means more to me now that I know it could have never been earned.

I've been lying to myself.

So…We all know the verse Whatever is true, whatever is…wait a minute lets start there.  Everything we think must be true right? We have thought it, it came out of our minds.  No, everything you think and feel is a real feeling and real thought, just it is not necessarily true.

Yet, if we lie to ourselves isn't our whole perception of reality off?

If you tell yourself that nobody likes you, then your going to walk around believing that no one likes you and every time someone is busy and they can't talk to you, your going to use that as support for that belief.  If someone is having a bad day, it's suddenly your fault because they are having a bad day because no one likes you.  

You may laugh, but to be honest that's been me for a while now.  I hate lies, and I don't like when lies are told to me and yet ironically I've been lying to myself for a long time.

I have told myself over and over that I'm not a very good friend, so every time something happens where I argue or something with one of my friends, it becomes my fault.  For it must be my fault, for I'm not a very good friend.

I'm not saying never take the blame, but I'm saying make sure your not taking the blame to further prove to yourself the lies your telling.

If you have ever seen the movie inception, I find it to be a good illustration.  Whenever the dreamer creates a dream they have to be as realistic as possible or the person having the dream's subconscious will start attacking them.  It senses an intruder and begins to attack it.

The first time we tell a lie to ourself we can sense it as an intruder and the trick is to catch it then.  Yet, when we keep telling it to ourself over and over again and we use actions of others or ourselves to justify it.  We start to believe it as truth.

Then, when it is revealed through God and others that the statement we have believed for so long is a lie.   We suddenly sense an intruder and try to attack it, when it's really the truth in the first place.

Lets take the body for example.  We have white blood cells who job is to identify foreign substances and then make antibodies to go and attack them.  Yet a lie is like a virus which hides itself in a body cell to make it harder for the white blood cells to identify them.  Since you are lying to yourself, your brain has diquised its thoughts to look like truth.

Yet, when your trying to replace the lie with truth.  The one thing that is helping you feels like it's hurting you. It's like host-graft disease.  When people have an organ that isn't working sometimes they are lucky enough to get an organ transplant.  Yet, sometimes when an organ is placed in the body, the white blood cells see it as a foreign substance and start attacking it.

Yet why have we trained the white blood cells in our brain to see lies as truth and truth as lies.  Why do we even lie to ourselves when it gets us all messed up like this?

We lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better or to explain things that have hurt us in society.

I have had many friend break-ups and I've realized that it made me feel better to take the blame.  Why you ask? For if it was my fault, then that just means I didn't do enough, and I'm just not the best friend in the world.  Maybe I can do next time and fix that.  I'm in control of that.  Yet, if I choose to believe the truth maybe that they weren't a good friend and they don't love me.  That's something I can't control and it makes me sadder to think that someone doesn't really love me then believe that I just need to be a better friend.

Yet, this is just an excuse not to cope with your feelings.  I lie to myself so that I don't have to feel the pain of coping with the truth.  Yet, if you give your hurt to God, He will patch up the pain, yet in order to give it to God you have to be honest with Him that it is there.

Yet, I don't want to do this anymore, because it has gotten me nowhere.  So, let's tell others what we say to ourselves because sometimes we will recognize the lie better when it's said out loud.   Also, let's pray and ask God to change our thoughts and show us the beauty in truth.  Let us think about whatever is true..

What if our weaknesses were really mismanaged strengths?

Lately, I have been curious about this principle of what we call human nature.  We say our human nature is to sin and is sinful correct? Yet, was that what God initially created humans to be? No! Originally, before the fall human nature wasn't to sin, human nature was to glorify God.  They walked and talked with God in the garden and honored God with their lives.

Then, the fall happened and life got tricky.  What was the original intent of human nature got corrupted, and mismanaged.  It would be like taking a nice and clean CD whose original intent was to promote the creator's music

and scratching it and ripping it until it couldn't succeed at what it was originally intended to do.  Yet is the old CD still there, yes it's just covered with scratches and holes.

So, I like to see our heart as that old battered up CD before Christ.  Yet, if we have accepted the gospel and have a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, we are a new creation. "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" 2 Coriththians 5:17   Yet, is this old thing that has gone the CD itself or the scratches?  Either way, Jesus has a provided a way for us to come back to our original intent to glorify God.  He has made a way for our CD to be read.  

Yet, a lot of us get trapped in our thinking.  We think we are humans, so therefore since our nature is to sin, we have to deal with certain weaknesses because of it.  Yet, human nature didn't begin as a sinful nature it began as a holy one and with the Lord's help we can begin acting like it.  

"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will." Romans 12:2

How do we not conform?  Is it all about trying to fight our sinful nature? No, it's about being more 

focused on transforming our mind.

So, just a thought but what if all of our weaknesses are just original strengths being misused? 

Let's take pride for example…Is it wrong to be proud of God and what He is made? No, of course not.

Yet we take this strength and make it a weakness when we our proud of ourselves and begin to think that it is all about us, instead of all about God. 

Let's take selfishness for example..Is it wrong to love how God made you to be? No, of course not.  He tells us to love others as we love ourselves. Wouldn't it be kinda of insulting to God if we didn't love who He made us to be?  Yet, this becomes mismanaged when we start seeing ourselves as the only one to love and forget to realize since God made everyone we should love how everyone is made and treat them respectfully.

We have started using the qualities God has given us to worship God, instead to worship ourselves. 

So… What if we lived with this kinda of thinking? Instead of constantly focused on our weaknesses and just getting blinded with trying hard to fix them all the time, we could start giving our weaknesses to God and asking Him to take those mismanaged strengths and show us how to manage it better.  

Am I trying to glorify human nature and say that we don't really have problems? No, human nature has become corrupted but all I'm trying to say is as a Christian we don't have to be defined by it.  

As a Christian, we have God's divine help to help lead us back to what original nature was designed and destined to be.  So, let's stop telling ourselves that we sin because of our nature, because in Christ we have a brand new nature.  Instead lets stop defining ourselves by our weaknesses and allow God to  help us stop mismanaging our strengths, so we can live how God originally designed us to live, for the glory of God.

You Are What You Think!!

You are….I am??

I began this summer plagued with anxiety.  My feelings and thoughts got so muddled that my identity was lost.  It got so bad that I was going to read a book on identity.

My thoughts were like this:

Kenady, what are you doing? why do you feel this way? Are you crazy? Just stop feeling this way. What if I make the wrong choice? Is God still for me if I make the wrong choice?  I want to be on God's side but what if I visit the wrong church today and then hear the wrong message and then set back my growth process?  

Who am I?  I don't know who I am!! Am I a beaver? a lion? some people think I am an otter, am I?

If you think I'm exaggerating, then think again.

My identity was and still sometimes is in the choices that I make.  This made every decision super stressful and every choice defined me.  I, then, took my powerful mind to Pine Cove where we take this quiz about personalities and that one quiz rattled my insecurities, since how other people defined me wasn't definitive.  I couldn't tell who I was because I wasn't basing my identity on truth rather on how I felt.

If I felt as if no one loved me, I became unlovable.  If someone told me I was an otter, when I took the test and got beaver, I would doubt my test taking skills and my discernment of who I was.

You are what you think so…

I was inadequate 

I was crazy

I was insecure

I was confused

I was broken

Then when camp started, I was worried about how people would think about me.  I didn't want to get disciplined, or in trouble.  I wanted others to see the real me so I ironically strived to be the me I thought I could be instead of just being who I was.  Yet, slowly the real me just came out and some ugliness with it.

This whole time I was swimming on the surface where as deep down there was sin and it was ugly.  This sin is selfishness.  So, the very person who didn't want to get confronted with discipline, got talked to.

Yet ironically, it took a humbling to boost my worth in my self.  For the words of wisdom and edification broke me.  Then, my thoughts turned to self-hate.  I started thinking of all the bad things that happened and the bad things in me.

I later was told that God disciplines those He loves and that deep down there was a mighty warrior inside me and that it just was going to take great care and discipline, so that I could reach my full potential.

So, with that my thoughts starting thinking of the gifts that God had given me and the love for others I had in my heart, and that I didn't want my selfishness to get in the way of letting others see how much and how deeply I care about them.

So my thoughts instead of focusing on me began to focus on others.  Which freed my mind up, so that I could love and serve and not hear those lies from the enemy.

You are what you think…so why not think truth?

For now I know with Christ in me that...

I am loved 

I am strong

I am cherished

I am transparent

I am capable 

I am a good friend 

I am wise

I am free to be me

I am a women of God.