Insert: stock photo image I found from googling “stock photo kid at school mad”
Cut back to 4/2/21 (about a month ago), I talked about how I’m handling my mistakes.
Read here: https://youlovedfirst.blogspot.com/2021/04/how-im-handling-my-mistakes-blog-6.html
It’s crazy how a month of God’s work can CHANGE you inside and out.
I wrote: “I told one of my best friends that at work my co-worker pointed out a mistake I made to help me, but I was filled with a sense of dread, shame, and spiraled when my co-worker was just making sure I was doing my job right in a kind and professional way. I felt bad that my coworker had to check me, and I felt bad for making the mistake. I just felt bad about everything. I think my job, working as a physics content creator, has brought out this side of me, 15 year old Grace, that I hate, but I realized that’s why I need to keep working there. Every correction is a moment for me to experience God’s grace and my own.”
Today, my manager brought up two questions that I wrote for my job as a physics content creator that weren’t up to their standards. For some people their gut reaction might be anger, but mine is to become embarrassed, ashamed, and distraught. I might have rewritten those questions on the spot even though it’s nearly 1 AM now as I write this. I felt bad for not doing my job in the right way, but it was an appropriate level of bad. It was enough to make me feel like I wanted to do a better job writing questions. I was fine. I wrote back “Got it, I’ll rewrite those questions and any others I notice to make sure they’re up to standard. Thanks for the feedback.”
To you that may mean nothing, but to me that was game-changing. I wasn’t in the throws of my own self-pity party. There was NO time at which I heard my brain calling me stupid. There was no pit in my stomach. No pang in my heart. Nothing. I just felt an appropriate level of emotion given the situation and moved on. I didn’t hold it against myself. I had never done that before.
For you that may be nothing, but for me that’s revolutionary living.
That’s the power of the Holy Spirit in action.
The great thing about God pulling you out of your victim narrative is that you are TEACHABLE.
You’re not busy being sad about what a bad job you did. You’re not working to prove yourself as smart, capable, and worthy. You allow yourself to experience what every human has felt before. You allow yourself to be human: fallible. You allow God to be God: perfect. You don’t leave the story there though, so you get up and go at it again.
I’m honestly so amazed at how my mindset has changed.
Some things that I did as I worked through to this point:
I told my small group about this problem, and I wrote about it on this blog.
I’ve been reading the book “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality” again with my small group.
I’ve been trying to do more daily prayer, Bible study, and just watched a sermon with my best friend.
I started reading “Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It” to combat my lack of coping mechanism when it comes to my emotional life and separating my worth from any external or internal factors outside of Jesus.
I decided that I wanted to take this whole process seriously.
I am amazed by the goodness of God again, and what’s even cooler is that since I have this blog, I am able to document and remember I even had this problem in the first place and now I can update you all and myself on how it’s going. This blog has been a wonderful experience of self-expression, honoring the personhood of God in me, celebrating God, remembering God, and working through my struggles on a public platform i.e. lack of shame in how broken I am.
I’m actually shocked at how God can work, and I’ll be honest there’s seasons in my life where God will let me take the scenic route before we reach my solution. He’s not trying to be mean, but that’s what needed to happen for me to either see the truth, be humble enough to do something about it, or have the emotional bandwidth to handle and process those problems.
Let this be a testament to God’s ability to rewire your brain. You don’t have to follow the same mental tapeloops. You’re not destined to fall back into the arms of old addictions. In Christ, you always have the freedom to choose and fight. Some days, you lose the battle, but that does not say anything about God’s love, compassion, and unwillingness to give up on you. God is the one who wins the war, and we just continue to push until we finish this race.
Comments
Post a Comment