What if you were kind to yourself today?
What if you looked in the mirror and smiled? Instead of counted gray hairs and wrinkles.
What if you didn’t step onto the scale? What if instead you stepped into the middle of your floor and spun fast and loud to the music blaring joy out the loud speakers?
What if you read a love letter today instead of Twitter? One written to you. A thousand years ago.
God told them, “I’ve never quit loving you and never will.
Expect love, love, and more love!
What if you believed it?
What if you changed up the dialogue in your head? What if you listed the things you were good at, the tasks you’d accomplished, the dreams you were chasing and the people you mattered to?
What if you wrote down the names of the people you love?
What if you thought up new ways to love them, on purpose? No matter what mood they were in.
What if you bought yourself flowers? And gave half of them away?
What if you walked instead of scurried between your to-dos?
What if you sat still for a cup of tea?
What if you made a phone call over lunch? What if you shared a virtual donut with a friend and told her all the things that you know would make your day?
What if you counted the number of times God says that He is with you? With you. Not sometimes, not when you’ve got it all together. Not when you’ve lost that weight, succeeded at that job, tamed that child.
Just with you. Period.
What if you remembered who you really are? Not who the magazines, the commercials, the media tell you you’re supposed to be.
What if you remembered and were kind to yourself – because you are a child of God?
Beautiful, called, named, beloved.
Worth more than the scale and the lists and the demands and the expectations.
What if you were to open your arms to the litany of ways in which you were beloved?
And believed it – what could you do then today?
How is it that false or foolish things that people speak over us when we’re 15 can hold more weight than the truth that people who love us speak when we’re adults?
Maybe it’s time to change that. Maybe it’s time to be brave and write down two things in the comments today:
1. What lie about yourself have you believed?
2. What do you know to be true and kind and sung over you by Jesus?
Don’t share it for us. Write it down for you.
In these comments or in a journal or the back of an envelope or on the bathroom mirror.
Write down the lie and then write down the truth and listen to the sound of the hammer smashing right through the one to make room for the other.
As our friend Jennifer Dukes Lee says, you’ve been pre-approved. Not by anything you’ve done but by everything God is.
Let’s pause to celebrate that today.
I’ll go first:
1. I have believed the lie that when someone else creates, it means there isn’t room left over for me.
2. I know that Jesus reminds me over and over again that the Kingdom of God is a co-op and never a competition. There’s always room for more.
OK, your turn….
Last photo by Jennifer Dukes Lee – we highly recommend checking out the #PreApproved Movement that she’s started.
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