The Building Blocks

Everyone wants to believe that we are exactly who we have made ourselves to be and that we have complete control over who we are now and who we are becoming. To an extent this is true but I have found that is so much that goes into the making of us. Words spoken rashly can become building blocks of our person. Events that seemed so small at the time, sometimes even forgotten for years, become cornerstones.

As I have moved from my teens into adulthood I have this to be especially true for myself. I remember a time when I was not even 19 yet and speaking in front of a group of high school kids at my church in Spokane. I had been asked to give my testimony and was speaking about some of the difficult things I had gone through in my life, mainly losing my father to cancer at the age of five and I dealt with and processed that. At the end I wrapped it up with this point: "We do not have control over many of our circumstances but we do have control over how we react to those circumstances. We can choose to become bitter and angry and let the painful things bend us and twist us and break us, or we can choose to walk in life and forgiveness and allow those things to develop us and grow us."

I still believe this to be true but have since learned about how some things in our lives can severely damage and define us without our even realizing it.

I first began to discover this truth in my own life in the fall of 2005. I was 20 and had been living in Spokane Washington for three years. I had come home to Montana for Thanksgiving and couldn't sleep one night due to unusual amounts of introspection inspired by a few months of mild depression. I decided to do the only thing that I can in those moments and write it out. As I was writing I had an epiphany. I wrote in my journal that night, "Mediocre. I think I could use that word to define myself. I feel like I have something unique and worthwhile to offer and I even get frustrated with people don't desire to get to know me because 'I have so much to offer and they'll never know because they're too shallow to look deeper' but then I look at my life and I don't see it. I don't think I really contribute anything to my current friendships No, that's not right, I don't contribute anything unique to my friendships. I don't contribute anything unique the ministries I'm involved in (aside from the prayer ministry where my 'unique' contribution is my age). I feel so expendable, so replaceable. I want to be wrong about this. I really do. I just want to be significant. I want to know that if I leave Spokane soon my being there would have been for a reason. To know that I made a difference, that I touched people's lives. I want to stop feeling like I have to prove myself. Prove that I have a contribution to make, prove that I'm lovely. I guess that's what it comes down to. I don't feel lovely. For some reason I feel as though I need to give people a reason to love me. Because otherwise I feel they won't. I don't feel as though anyone will love me without a reason. I guess that must mean that I don't feel worthy of being loved. Wow. I never thought that'd be the case. Well, there you have it. I am not as confident as I seem. I'm not tough. Not really. I'm insecure and fragile. I guess in a lot of ways I'm still that little five year old girl huddled in the corner who thinks that if I'd just been good enough (not good as in well behaved, but good as in adequate, worthy, lovely) my daddy wouldn't have died. Wouldn't have left me here alone. That's what I am, I suppose. A broken little girl who does not feel worthy of love."

It was in the writing of that second paragraph that I had the epiphany. Up until that moment I had not once even considered the possibility that the reason why I was so constantly getting involved in some ministry or other at church, the reason why I could never say no when someone asked me to do something, was because I was trying to prove myself to others and, quite possibly, to myself.