#HowISeeMyself

I started this as an Instagram post, but it very quickly turned into a journal. Last week Joel Nobis posted a challenge. The challenge is to find one word each week (for the next 10 weeks) that you feel describes the way that God sees you. I’m someone that tries my best to see the beauty in others and speak it, but when it comes to me, I struggle. But when you can see yourself the way that God made you, the enemy doesn’t stand a chance.

My word for week 1 is a word that made me cringe for the longest time. Not that I think it’s a gross word or anything, it’s just really hard for me to process. It’s never a word that comes to mind when I think of myself, but it’s a word that has come up a lot in this season of my life, and I feel like God is trying to teach me more about it. My word is strong.

I’m struggling to write this right now. I’ve retyped this time and time again, and I think this post is going to be a little messy, but this post isn’t my story of overcoming and having conquered the meaning of this word in my life…but it’s a reminder for me and for anyone that needs to hear it. This post is real.

Around the time that I moved to Pittsburgh, this word has been in my mind. It’s the word that my sister used to describe me as I moved. It’s the word that one of my best friends used to describe me months later, when we sat outside her house around a campfire, and I told her my whole life story. It’s the word that someone I look to as a mentor used as I sat on her couch and cried to her. Not that I look at myself as weak for moving, but I find it so easy to look at what I’ve gone through, or to look at myself being upset as this weak thing.

I get in my head. I tell myself that I wouldn’t have gone through what I did or gotten upset about things if I was strong. I tell myself that people have been through more than I have, so I really can’t be that strong.

But just because people have been through more than me does not mean that I haven’t been through a lot. I know I’ve been through a lot, I’ve made decisions that I shouldn’t have, and I’ve fallen so many times… but my beautiful friends, if you’re in that space, I’m reminding you and I’m reminding myself tonight that this doesn’t mean you aren’t strong. (I bet, deep down, you know that you’re strong, because the stuff you’ve been through makes you want to be there for other people even when you’re going through stuff. You want to be strong for other people even when you feel like your world is falling apart.)

You see, strength isn’t about falling, it’s about getting back up. Strength isn’t about your old decisions, it’s about the way you grow from them. Strength isn’t about what you’ve been through, it’s how you got through it. Can I say that going through those things and acknowledging your feelings makes you even stronger?

As I’m typing this I feel like there are a lot of people that are trying to hold in what they’ve gone through because they’ll think of themselves as even weaker for sharing their past and their struggles- but that’s because the enemy is trying to keep these things in the dark. He wants these things to eat you alive. But the second that you tell someone you trust about them, you start to get even stronger.

Strength comes when you stop trying to fight these battles on your own- when you pair up with community around you that can lift you up and remind you that you may feel like you’re weak, but God’s strengthening you to fight through the battle.

And if you’re still struggling, I challenge you to think about this: You’ve made it this far. You’re sitting here right now and you’re reading this post. You have fought through the past and you are still fighting and YOU. ARE. STRONG. If it feels like too much, lean on God. I promise He’s got you.

Calling on Him doesn’t mean that He sees you as this weak little being. God never intended for you to keep everything to yourself. He never wanted you to look at yourself and say that you weren’t worthy of being loved because you’ve been through stuff. It’s not about what you’ve been through or what you’ve done. God looks at you and He sees His Son. When God looks at me, He sees Jesus. And what I know about Jesus is that He was/is STRONG. I think this is quite possibly the hardest thing that I’ve ever tried to realize/work on, but it’s something that I’m learning day by day- to rely on strength that comes from the Lord, especially when I feel weak.

God sees you as strong.

God sees me as strong.