You are the Expert

Somewhere along the journey of my life, I stumbled upon a truth.  I didn’t read it anywhere, I didn’t hear it from another person.  It came to me one day, landing on my mind like a butterfly.  One of the names of God in the Bible is “Counselor.”  I think this thought came from the Counselor.

I’m sure you have observed how even children have a pecking order.  On the playground, there’s the cool kids.  They often have the best clothes, the best looks and everything they touch seems to turn to gold.  They come up with an idea and everybody is for it.  Even teachers can be swayed by the cool kids.

Then there’s the rest of us.  It’s often most evident when two students are  told by a gym teacher to pick teams just where each classmate fits on which rung of the pecking order ladder.  I hope physical education instructors have learned to stop this picking-teams thing because it is such a humiliating experience to always be picked last.

And unfortunately this practice doesn’t end once we pick up our high school diplomas.  In college, fraternities and sororities also have pecking orders, and on and on it goes.  When we go into the world, we often have to interview for a job and there the decision is made by someone else if we “measure up.”   No wonder the rejection monster looms so largely in so many of our minds.

But one would think one’s rung on the pecking order would change a lot as we change schools, as we transition from school to work, as we move from state to state or even nation to nation.  Sometimes a change in venue can work wonders, but I’ve observed many of the places where people fit in the pecking order say, ninth grade, are still where they fit in their 50s.    I’ve seen beautiful, talented people with so much potential still think they’re ugly ducklings decades later.  Why do you suppose this is?

So that’s where the butterfly landing I alluded to earlier comes in.  And this is what I learned: you are the expert about you. You can’t get away from yourself, you’re with yourself 24 hours a day.  So therefore, if you, the expert,  don’t like yourself, why should anyone else like you?  If you don’t accept yourself, then why should anyone else?

People pick up on how you feel about yourself in a myriad of ways.  They listen to how you talk about yourself.  They watch how you walk, how you interact with others.  A person who likes himself or herself isn’t going to abuse drugs, isn’t going to be morbidly obese for non-medical reasons.

When we have isolated ourselves, often we blame others for the state we are in.    Make no mistake, some people can be really cruel, really, really cruel. But people  like Corrie TenBoom survived the Jewish Holocaust and then traveled the world telling people about how much God loves them.  Corrie most definitely didn’t isolate herself after her horrible ordeal.

So what I’m saying is sometimes there is something in ourselves that is causing people to treat us the way they do. Sometimes though, we can be so blinded by our pain that we can’t even see our part in that pain existing in the first place.

Let me try to explain.

1. First,  maybe we don’t get the best start in life and we start believing the lie that we are substandard, that others are more important than we are.
2.  So then others pick up on how we feel about ourselves and  don’t treat us very well
3. So we see #2 as proof #1 is correct.  We continue believing the lie that we are substandard and flawed.
4. More and more people treat us poorly and so we start hating ourselves.
5. This is where addictions like over eating, marathon video game playing, drinking, smoking, sleeping around and doing drugs take hold.  If our religious beliefs don’t allow any of these outlets, we can become unloving Pharisees instead.
6. If the cycle isn’t broken, we find ourselves walking down nightmare paths.

But the good news is, this cycle can be broken.  You can break free.  It all begins in YOUR head.  The Bible calls it renewing your mind.  See, you, yes YOU, are so important, Jesus died for you.  He died to give you a fresh new start, an abundant life.  He died so you can live in heaven with Him when you leave this earth.  He was tortured so your life here on earth will be marked by joy and peace, no matter what your circumstances are.  The Bible says to all who have opened their hearts to Jesus, to them he gave the right to be called children of God.

For me, it was years after I invited Jesus into my heart before I began to grasp how loved I really was.  I believed the lies for so long that I was ugly, worthless and stupid  that it took a long time to dislodge those beliefs.  I’m sad to say sometimes those dead beliefs still try to resurrect, but the older I get, the faster those beliefs go back to the grave where they belong.

That butterfly landed softly but stung those lies like a bee.