I started this blog out of a desire to share my story in an authentic way to empower others to see the value and the beauty in their stories as well.
My target audience is women (no offense, guys, but I GET women), and
particularly women who have walked through abuse or addiction or
co-dependency. As women, our heart is our
greatest weakness, because we will love and give and nurture and connect and
support at great cost to ourselves without hesitation. But our hearts are also our greatest
strength, because we will love and give and nurture and connect and support at
great cost to ourselves without hesitation.
Do you see the paradox? It is the
very paradox of Christ himself – “Greater love has no one than this – to lay
down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13, New International
Version). Our hearts get us into
trouble, because we get hurt and used and abandoned and disappointed time and
again. Our tendency toward unconditional
love is risky, but I firmly believe – and said in an earlier blog post - that we must
never stop taking those risks. C.S.
Lewis famously put it this way:
To love at all
is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly
broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no
one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little
luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of
your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will
change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable,
irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. (The Four Loves).
I believe with all of my heart that
authenticity is the key to freedom, to relationships, to healing and wholeness,
to connection and to life itself. Yet it seems a rare
commodity. How is authenticity possible in a world full of hackers and scammers and users and abusers?
First, my authenticity is only possible because I am redeemed by the
blood of the Lamb! Without Christ my
story is simply about broken-ness, but through Christ, my story is about
redemption and healing. Authenticity,
however, requires that I tell the WHOLE story – and that includes the
broken-ness part. As such, there is
beauty in broken-ness because the story doesn’t end with my failures or losses
or tragedies. I heard Joyce Meyer say it
this way last weekend, “The biggest way we can give Satan a black eye is to
give God our mess and let Him make it our message." That is what drives my authenticity.
But Scripture also challenges me over and
over again to focus on truth, and isn’t truth at the very heart of
authenticity? There are well over a
hundred verses in the Bible that speak of truth (or lack of truth), but these
are some of my favorites:
Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent? Who may live on your holy
mountain? The one whose walk is
blameless, who does what is righteous, who speaks the truth from
their heart. Psalm 15:1, 2
Guide
me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long. Psalm 25:5
In
your majesty ride forth victoriously in the cause of truth, humility and justice; let your right hand achieve awesome
deeds. Psalm 45:4
Then
you will know the truth, and the
truth will set you free. John
8:32
I,
the Lord, speak the truth; I
declare what is right. Isaiah 45:19
These
are the things you are to do: Speak the truth
to each other, and render true and sound judgment in your courts. Zechariah 8:16
But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that
what they have done has been done in the sight of God. John 3:21
Yet
a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the
Father in the Spirit and in truth,
for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. John 4:23
Love
does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 1 Corinthians 13:6
Our Abba God loves authenticity. He loves the truth of our
stories and the truth of our hearts, no matter how broken or bleeding. I'm here to tell my story... care to tell yours?
