Week 9: Name one thing you have lied to yourself about. Why did you do this?

If I ever wanted to skip a prompt thus far, this one would have been it. I couldn’t come up with any response that didn’t feel like revealing my deepest flaws. However, I decided a long time ago that if I am not going to write vulnerably and honestly, then I have nothing to say at all. Therefore, whether we are close, or have never met, you are about to get to know me a lot better.

The best, most simple way I can respond to this question is that I have lied to myself about my SELF. I am someone who cares an awful lot about what other people think of me. In fact, it drives a lot of my personal decisions. So much so, that I often fool even myself. I make a decision that I think is totally my own, but when given time to consider it, I realize that the driving force behind what I do is regularly with someone else’s preference in mind.

I feel as though a lot of my adulthood has been about learning to recognize my own preference, as my default is to first consider how other people will view my choices.

This trait of mine makes it so that I am often classified as “considerate” or “thoughtful.” I am often told I am “selfless,” but I am here to confess that I think it is perhaps quite the opposite.

One of my biggest “lies” to others and myself is that my preoccupation with approval from people makes me selfless, when in reality it is more accurately an indicator of my obsession with self.

It feels ugly to even write that. Yet, it remains true as I realize that worrying so much about what other people think and feel about my life and my decisions is assuming an awful lot about the importance of my life and my decisions.

In seeking growth and healing for my “need for approval” over the years I have read books, gone to counseling, and sought wisdom from mentors. I have been “diagnosed” with co-dependency, “classified” as a two on the enneagram (helper), and placed on just about every personality scale as a “servant” who “needs to be needed.” While these all hold true on some level, this question today forced me to look at my motivation behind my actions, rather than just the actions themselves. The reality under all the names I am given is that I struggle with the sin of self-importance.

I realize that I live in a quest for worthiness and I look in all of the wrong places. Therefore I end up racing on the hamster wheel of "helping," just to find my validation in the “service” of others. If I am needed, then I matter. “I, I, I.”

My dad gifted me a book that has freed me on so many levels called, Loveable, by Kelly Flanagan. On the topic of self-worth he states that, “reclaiming your worthiness-and living from it- is your responsibility” (p.28). RECLAIMING. To RE claim, means the worthiness is already mine. I am worthy not because of my SELF and all the things I am “needed” for. Not because other people approve of all my decisions or envy me. Not because I deserve it at all! Rather I am worthy because God made me, and despite my brokenness, He calls me worthy. That’s it!

To assume I can somehow earn my worth by impressing others is in vain. It is my responsibility to claim my worthiness-yes, but not by convincing others I deserve it. The ONLY way to claim my worth is by seeking the ONLY one who can assign it to me, and that is Christ. Thank goodness, He is also willing to give it to me despite the fact that I will NEVER deserve it. How free that makes me indeed!

Eugene Peterson in the Message version of the Bible puts its like this; “obsession with self is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing” Romans 8:6-8.

With this in mind, it is my hope and prayer that the older I get, the less I will seek approval of others and the more I will understand the already-existing approval of Christ. I want to serve and love even more, but not to gain worth, rather to spread the message of the worth that is already all of ours in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.