The question is... what traits define us?
The ones that others say encapsulate our lives?
The ones that we say depict our lives?
Or the ones that God proclaims to be truth?
After a deep conversation with friends yesterday on this, I went home running the conversation through my head. I realized how often I am stuck in a bubble of things that other people view me to be. As much as affirmations and encouragement is phenomenal, sometimes I sit back and see a common theme. I see myself as A, B, or C and am left wondering if that is all there is to me. Then, as much as I consciously probably never realized it, most of the time I actually start to believe what other people say. I take the affirmations and view them as my strengths. Then I look at all the things I wish people said about me but don't, and sometimes actually believe I lack those qualities altogether.
Then of course, there are tests after tests done to try and make us figure out the things we are good at, our passions, our strengths, what defines us. I see a common theme emerging. We let everyone and everything else tell us who we are, and we are left not even figuring out who we are ourselves.
What a shame.
What a shame that I would rather spend my time and my days with music blaring, people around me talking, tv shows on, the radio going, and on and on and on. What a shame that I can't actually sit with my own thoughts for longer then ten minutes or just sit and figure out where I'm at and what I need.
In an attempt to be community based, to be extraverted, to be outgoing, we have left ourselves neglected in a sense. Other people define us more then we choose what we want our own life and our own heart to look like.
When I began to follow Jesus I was not loving.
Or so I thought. I am still lost in translation when it comes to figuring out if I really lacked the ability to love people well or if the couple people that told me I was unloving made such a dent in my perception of myself that I actually believed it to be truth. But nonetheless, I believed for years, truly and wholeheartedly, that I just was not a loving person. God has created all these people around me that were loving and I just began to believe I was not created that way. I was opinionated, I said what I believed, I was stubborn occasionally and I had yet to learn what it felt like to walk in other shoes. So in light of all of that, in the eyes of those that I let hold weight in my life, it led them to view me as unloving.
It sucked.
For years as I struggled to find Jesus and find myself too, I felt I lacked the one 'quality' that Jesus clearly and repeatedly emphasized for His followers to have. That was one of the hardest loops to jump through in my walk with God. I felt that the things people put on me and led me to believe about myself were things that somehow God put on me too. God never told me that I was unloving though and the minute I stopped letting people's affirmations and judgements make or break my perception of myself, was the minute everything changed.
I am not unloving. The Holy Spirit enables my heart to forgive and love in ways that doesn't make sense to even me sometimes. Love is also not an innate characteristic or quality, it's a choice. A mindset that you have to put on every single day that pushes you and guides you to view others as better then yourself. If I continued on believing I was unloving, I think one day I truly would have been wholeheartedly unloving.
People's opinions cannot make or break who we believe ourselves to be.
If they do, our lives will be a tangled mess of other's peoples judgements.
Affirmations are great, just don't neglect the things you don't get affirmed in and view them as entirely not present in your life. Personality tests are great, but your personality and strengths are more then a internet test can present to you. Friends opinions are great, but God's opinion is better and holds infinitely more weight.
