Breaking the False Narratives
I recently heard a podcast, and the Christian therapist on the program told the host, that “many of us when we are younger created narratives as means of defense against some tough issues and situations that we encountered in life, but at some point, in our adult lives we must choose to tell ourselves that we no longer need those narratives. Those narratives helped us survive for a time, but if kept around can limit our potential.”
God, in a recent coaching session with a Christian coach I am using, showed me either a setting or rising sun, behind some clouds over a body of water. When my coach asked me what that meant to me, I paused and searched for God’s meaning of the image; the phrase that came to mind, “unlimited potential”. With the assistance of a Christian coach, who specializes in cognitive breakthrough, God has been breaking off false narratives that I have created throughout my life to be a protection from threats and hurts that have come against me.
One of those false narratives, “I am unworthy” and that goes far beyond the human condition that “none of us are worthy”, was stemmed from a picture that I painted using watercolors; our 4th-grade assignment was to paint 2 objects, one in the foreground and one in the background. I painted a sun and mountains in the background and a tree in the foreground; I put my heart on that paper, and I was awarded among several classmates the opportunity to have it displayed in the hallway. A day or two later it had been vandalized by someone writing an obscene phrase. “My heart”, had an obscene and derogatory comment written on it for all the world to see; I showed the teacher and asked her to take it down. It was from that day forward that I believed I wasn’t a good artist and formed a distaste for art. I enjoy looking at artistic people’s works, but I, personally, will not pick up watercolors, markers, or paint and create works of art; I don't even like doing art on computer programs. What came out in this session with my coach was not only did I lose interest in art, but I lost my self-worth.
God wanted to heal that narrative, but more recently we were trying to find a correlation between the thought “I am not valuable” and my mindset around finances. When God showed me the age and the event, it made so many things make sense; something that happened the month of my 20th birthday at work had created false narratives about financial stuff, my relationships with the opposite gender, and my own value as a human being.
A fence around your house can protect you from people entering your yard, but a fence around a prison can prevent convicts from escaping. A fence is a fence, and it all depends on the application; if the fence is created to keep out intruders, but you never leave... are you in a house or a prison? It's time for us to shake off those false narratives, break through them and leave them behind. Perhaps God’s word for you is “unlimited potential”, like it was for me. Perhaps you and I can both experience the freedom that our narratives have kept us from. God’s got a greater purpose for us, but if we remain trapped by our false narrative, we’ll never meet our full potential.