How many times do we ask for honesty in a relationship? The absence of honesty is normally that deal breaker or leads to an event that causes friction or ends a relationship. Yet, have you ever consider how honest you are with yourself? Let's be "honest"...how many of us avoid honesty when it comes to ourselves? It's like we make a concerted effort to live a lie, even when the lie will not benefit us in the end! Crazy right? So, we won't accept lies from others, family, and more, but we will lie to ourselves.
In Chapter 1 of Uninvited, the author taps into how we fear honesty because we are afraid of "honesty's intention to expose and hurt us" so it gives us those mental signals of "danger, danger." But the truth is...our relationship with honesty is worth saving. When we are honest with ourselves we are able to discover those areas of misalignment, like dealing with the spirit of rejection. And when we identify and conquer the root of those areas of misalignment, we are put in the position to heal, develop a strong relationship with God and live a purpose driven life!. "Honesty isn't trying to hurt me. It's trying to heal me."
Let's think about that...there are so many situations where we will be in a relationship, whether friendship or dating and when it turns sour we will look back on signals we chose to ignore. The character attributes, behavior, personality cues and more that a person showed us and we neglected. We chose to create a facade of all the good things that we thought a person brought into our lives totally removing the downward spiral that was possible.
Is it time to renew you relationship with honesty? Whether its in poor habits, studying, eating, working, etc. it's time for truth serum. Date honesty, open the door for transparency and give it permission to reveal to you those areas of misalignment in your life so that you can began to implement a better strategy to get back on track. Personally, I know that if I just took the time to focus and eliminated distractions, i.e. Netflix, tv, randomness, I would be so much better for it in my blogging, my photography, my homeschooling of my child, even my work as an employee in my full-time job.
I challenge you this week to pursue honest moments with yourself. Start small and look at those truth you try to avoid. Be honest with yourself, just as you expect others to be honest with you, because then and only then will you align those areas in your life that are off. Going through the motions and ignoring what's happening doesn't lead to better results. A matter of fact, that could simply lead to the same results and then we have madness, then anxiety, then depression...must I go on? That relationship with honesty, so worth saving especially when you consider the path it can guide you towards.
I dare you to fall in love with honesty this week...
Please visit the Lovelee Motivation Facebook Page or Lovelee Motivation IG page to receive daily motivations and inspiration.
My inconsistency with this blog always gives me an aching feeling of failure and anxiety. That feeling feeds into procrastination, which initiates a relationship with some random Netflix series that truly test my ability to commit, and through this commitment I am left with no action on the blog and oh yeah, not so cool statements like "You're such a failure" and "You're so lazy!" and "Gotham is a really cool series, who knew all of those Batman characters came from these random plots!"
Yet, the nudge from God to do something with this Lovelee Motivation blog will not go away. When I get in my prayer closet and I sit there waiting for Him to lay some amazing Jeremiah 29:11 plans into my lap, this freaking blog is always dropped first. Then God's microphone. He then probably does "The Woah" back to his throne, while he rolls his eyes. Because see God has patiently been telling me this blog was a priority for years. (Side note: I won't leave you there to wonder."The Woah" is some dance my child just told me about that I had to educate myself on via YouTube. Let Google be your guiding light to Woah discovery.)
I have always made blogging a chore or an in-the-way item and prioritized it behind really important things like "Gotham, The Good People and Iron Fist Season 2 (Because I was psyched to watch Danny Rand whine about the privilege and responsibility placed on his life)." Ok, refocusing, that was a squirrel moment...but I was not using the blog in the way God intended. It was supposed to strengthen my communication with God as He used me as a touchpoint on topics that had affected me and my human ways of dealing with them, both successfully at times and not so much in others.
As we embark on the last 90 days of the year, I felt it would be really cool to finally be obedient to God regarding the Lovelee Motivation blog, while at the same time using this as an amazing 90 day challenge to create some stronger blogging habits. So you can expect a weekly blog from me over the next 90 days, and for some reason I feel really confident to say the blogs may come more than once a week. But the promise to you and myself is a weekly post on a topic pretty near and dear to me.
I read this amazing book a couple of months ago entitled, Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out and Lonely, by Lysa TerKeurst and it truly touched my life. It just so happens that I will be digging into this book again for a book club I recently started. Therefore, why not use my blog to speak into each chapter from my perspective? So, you can look forward to a blog from me each week! Ya me. I'm slightly excited. Actually really excited, because I know I am going to enjoy this ride into a topic close to my heart. Who knew rejection could push me into commitment?! Well, God probably did...I am sure He knew. But who else?
Back to the book! I really loved this book and the storytelling from Lysa, as she spoke of her battle with the Spirit of Rejection. That is truly the story of my life. I can't tell you how many projects I have not completed, posts I haven't posted, blogs I haven't shared, challenges I haven't met and relationships that I have failed in, simply because of the fear of rejection. The Spirit of Rejection makes me say things like "I'm independent, I'm a Loner, I don't need lots of friends" and then follow up with actions that strongly support all of those ridiculous statements. The truth being I love people, I love friends and I would love to be in a relationship, but to avoid the rejection of others I will usually do things that don't reflect the energy I would like in return.
Like right now I am really working on not blocking people. I know right? What grown person blocks people. This one does! Right here. If you say something I don't like, or that hurts my feelings, my first instinct is to block you so that I don't have to interact or see anymore texts from you. Also, it protects me from the texts that never come. Like what if you do something that hurts my feelings and you never even follow up to see if I am ok or tell me sorry? Well if you're blocked I will never know if you did or did not try. Totally protected! Right?
Rejection will have you creating lies in your head that were never said. It will have you defining your value based on the comments of others. It will leave you feeling lonely, broken, unlovable, and unworthy...ALL LIES! But this story starts with us and must end with us. See rejection is rooted in negative self talk which is usually attributed to some situation or event in your life. I know I can pinpoint mine to not really being liked in school when I was younger and excluded by others because I was such a tomboy at a private school, which led to me being a little bully (another story for another day.) But being rejected by the only 4-5 black girls that attended my private school left me putting on this hard exterior at the tender age of 7. Only to enter public school and be picked on by kids of my own race, again, because I spoke too proper. The ignorance of it all. So see, my rejection started early, but it lead to my relationship with perfectionism and then unsustainable relationships with friends and men I dated.
Uninvited gave me 3 extremely important and very true statements to counteract my negative self-talk. God is good. Good is good to me. I can trust God to be God. With those statements rooted in my soul I can Live Loved. And when you "Live Loved" you don't have to look for validation from others, because it's deep inside of you. I look forward to you joining me on this journey as we tackle the Spirit of Rejection and learn to love ourselves so that we can show others how to love us!
So there it is...my lackluster relationship with rejection can actually be the push I have been needing to be obedient to God. Whoa! That's interesting...Join me and hopefully we can get some really good conversation going and help each other tackle that "Spirit of Rejection!" And also teeter with the idea of how all rejection isn't bad, but it's not letting those moments of rejection define our value.
Please visit the Lovelee Motivation Facebook Page or Lovelee Motivation IG page to receive daily motivations and inspiration.
How many times do we ask for honesty in a relationship? The absence of honesty is normally that deal breaker or leads to an event that causes friction or ends a relationship. Yet, have you ever consider how honest you are with yourself? Let's be "honest"...how many of us avoid honesty when it comes to ourselves? It's like we make a concerted effort to live a lie, even when the lie will not benefit us in the end! Crazy right? So, we won't accept lies from others, family, and more, but we will lie to ourselves.
