It's been a rough week. At home, as most of you know, I'm busy. I'm always busy. Part of it is there are many things I care about - Campus life, church, school, family (including dealing with my grandpa's house), etc. And part of it is if I stay busy, I don't have time to think. It's an automatic "what do I have to do next" response. Here, I have a lot of time to think, and God has a lot of time to bring up areas where I need to let Him work. A large one that's been bugging me lately is in the area of self-esteem.
When it comes to many areas, I'm very confident. Teaching chemistry, I'm sure I can do that well...relationships with students, ditto. Remembering random, insignificant details...so much that it's scary at times. But once you get out of the realm of intelligence and into the areas of personal worth and value, I let past experiences and negative comments override what I know intellectually to be true. I heard somewhere that it takes at least 7 positive statements/compliments to negate 1 critical statement. If that's the case, I don't think I have any hope (said tongue in cheek...mostly). And going back to that scarily accurate memory...I remember them all...both the negative and the positive. For some reason, it is easier to remember the negative ones. Most of those statements were said by people who probably don't remember them now...who hopefully have grown up a bit. And thinking about it, the vast majority of comments that have been made to me in the last 10 years have been positive...but it's still so easy to dwell on the negative. I've been haunted a bit this week. It's led into some good conversations, and I think I'm starting to work through it...but it's not a fun process. Necessary, yes, if I want to be able to move on with my life, it is necessary. Enjoyable...not at all. I'm finding that many of those comments said to me a lifetime ago have stuck, and become something of an internal, silent mantra...one that I need to get rid of. And only God can do that.
In talking with one of my friends about this, she passed on a comment that someone had made to her about me a number of years ago. It was something along the lines of I have an exterior of stone and a heart of liquid gold. The problem is in breaking down that exterior...I'm pretty sure only God can do that.
Prayer would be appreciated. There is more involved here than I'm comfortable sharing on a public forum like this, but that's the gist of it. I'm talking with a few people about this right now and it's helping. I'm spending time praying about it, and it's helping. It's not going to be a quick process, but any progress is good, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment