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..