What more can I do? I just don't want to disappoint you!!

Some people would call me a people pleaser.  Others would say I'm too stubborn.  Yet, that doesn't change the fact that I don't want anyone to be disappointed in me, especially my elders and the ones that look up to me.

So…I can't make mistakes, that's just the way it has to be.  I can't make mistakes.

I grew up thinking this way.  I wanted to please my father and would cry at the slightest sign of disappointment.  Imagine how learning how to drive went.   When I messed up, he would tell me and I would think he was disappointed, and I would cry.  Yes, I would cry and I was almost 16!!

I didn't want to disappoint my dad.  I love him and want him to be proud of me.

Yet, this is how I viewed God.  I love God so so much and I don't want Him to be disappointed in his daughter.  I want to please Him, and I want Him to be happy with me.  These are all good desires that satan soon corrupted.

Spiritual Warfare has hit me hard this semester, and I say this not to give glory to the enemy,
but instead to give glory to God because He has saved me and restored me and has given me tools to fight against it.

Yet, satan kept telling me what worthless crap I was doing.   If I studied, I didn't study hard enough.  If I was busy, I couldn't handle it.  He would whisper and say, "Kenady, ugh, you are horrible at managing time, and I can't believe you have to do you homework tomorrow during lunch, ugh that's so despicable" "Your parents aren't going to be proud of you, and God is not going to give you this many responsibilities ever again, because you obviously can't handle them"

After I was in this storm for a while, I couldn't sleep at night.  I was so stressed out, and I didn't know how to have victory over it for it seemed every time I got something done; I had more to do.  It was this never ending cycle of things to do and satan made me believe that my head was spinning and that there was no way out.

Then, satan started corrupting my view of God.  He started telling me that God wasn't pleased and I started seeing God more like a drill sergeant who couldn't be pleased rather than my loving father.

Yet, I was sitting in chapel on wednesday and the speaker told us that the most important thing about us is how we view God.  He also said that God could never be more pleased with you than He is right now, because as a Christian I am in Christ.  God loves his son more than ever, so therefore He loves me more than ever.

So, I would like to dispel the lies of Satan for a moment.

In Christ,

We are loved
We are the righteousness of God, that's right we are righteous
We are valuable, for the value of something is showed by what someone will pay for it.
Jesus died for us and we were bought with that price.
We are worth dying for.

God is so pleased with us.
He delights in us.
He sings over us.

He could never love me more and He could never love me less.

So, readers, let us walk throughout the day knowing that we don't have to earn God's pleasure, that He could never be more pleased.

He hurts you a little, to save you from hurting a lot.

Who knew that I could glean from the TV series house!!!  How crazy is that!

There was an episode where there was a young teen who was sick and they didn't know why…yet there was one problem.  She was set to start sailing in a few days to break the world record and she had been training for it for a long time.

Yet, a few days in House's team found out she had cancer in her arm.  This cancer was fairly curable, as long as they amputated her arm.  Yet, if they amputated her arm, she couldn't set sail and break the world record.  So, she stubbornly said that she was going to set sail anyway, because she had been working for it her whole life.  But, if she did set sail, it was very likely the cancer would spread and she would lose her life.

Long story short…while she was in a medically induced coma, the parents signed a wavier to amputate her arm and basically save her life.  When she wakes up, she sees her arm and is furious and all she can think about is how she can't sail and that she has lost her arm.

The parents, however, are just glad that their daughter is alive.

I think this is how we are sometimes with God.  He knows best and He has oversight and wisdom.  He knows more than we even do.

So, sometimes He might hurt us a little, in order to, save us from hurting a lot.

He did this when Jacob wrestled with God in the bible.  He pushed his hip socket, to humble Him.
God could have totally won the wrestling match but He knew it served a purpose, so He only hurt him a little in order to save him from hurting a lot.

Yet, a lot of times when God is doing this.  We find ourselves angry and confused.  In the House episode,  the girl couldn't stop saying my arm, my arm.  We often get so focused on what we have lost, instead of, what we have gained.  She may have lost her arm, but her life was spared.

So, let us start believing that God is in control and it's a good thing too, because He sees what we can't, understands what we don't and has wisdom above us all.

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.  

How to lead a successful life

So today I was sitting in music business class of all places and my teacher asked me what the meaning of success was.  As I was sitting there, I kept thinking of the fact that everyone has a little different view on what the word success looks like.  Some might say success as the american dream while others consider living in a mansion success.  I googled success and these are the pictures that came up.

The result varies.  Yet one of my classmates defined it as:

Success is the accomplishment of a desired goal

So, wow success can vary a lot because success is dependent on your goal and the goal you have is determined by mindset you have about a certain topic.

I don't know about you, but I want to be successful.  I want to lead a very successful life.  So, I had to ask myself as a Christian what does that look like?

I must align my goals with healthy goals in scripture.  Last time I checked the bible never promised everyone to be rich and famous, so if that is what we consider success than we better change our goals because we will probably be very disappointed one day.

So, let us dive in to a passage of scripture that I think will help us start thinking in a way that can set us up for success

“Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them.15To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. 16The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. 17So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. 18But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

19“After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. 20The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

21“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

22“The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’

23“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

24“Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

26“His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? 27Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

28“ ‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. 29For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 30And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ Matthew 25: 14-30

Here is a few observations from this passage:

1. Every man got at least one bag.  So, we all get responsibilities, gifts, blessings…etc. from God

2. Not everyone got the same amount to begin with.  We all have different responsibilities, gifts, blessings…etc. from God

3. Among the two successful servants the amount of bags they had when their master came home was different.   Meaning success is not the same for everyone as far as numbers go.

So, how can we apply these principles to everyday life.

In this passage, we realize that God cares less about the amount you gain and more about how well you use the amount that you were given. 

He wants us to be good stewards of all that He has given you.  But lets take note that every man in this story receives a bag.  So we all have responsibilities, gifts and blessings that we need to take care of and be good stewards of.  Yet, the trouble comes when we start comparing bags, for more on this check out my blog on how comparison is the thief of joy.  When we compare the amounts we start with and the amounts we end with, we get disappointed but why should we? For the man who ended with 10 bags and the man with 5 bags both were considered successful to God.  So, our healthy goal should not be a number but rather a goal to make the best use of what we've got

So, let us commit to our bag, our load and responsibility and be faithful to it and watch it grow.  What if it does grow? be patient.  For like we saw in this stories, it was the faithfulness of the servants that was praised.  So be faithful to your responsibility.  Let that be your goal.  

My goal is to be called good and faithful servant at the end of my life.  So, success for me is to be faithful to the load God has given to me.  

So what's yours?

So, Readers I pray that we begin to renew our mind and set healthy goals.  God impressed upon my heart to start a series beginning with this one that focuses on changing our mindset and how that your mindset determines really the quality of your life.  So, if you think that is a good idea, please comment below and stay tuned for new posts. 

I love y'all

Kenady