Note: This may seem like a rather personal post for those of you who just stopped in for the first time. It was written in response to a question my friend Larry asked me yesterday. But it is my hope that as you read, you begin to gain an awareness of the lies you have believed about yourself for so many years and that you can catch a glimpse of the beautiful and amazing person you really are and the truth of the person you were created to be.

You know the scene. You’ve seen it a hundred times in the comics section of the paper and played out over and over on the Family Channel Christmas marathons. Lucy entices Charlie Brown into the football field with the promise that she will keep the football firmly on the ground this time. She won’t move it, she promises. He can kick it as hard as he wants. Come on, she entreats. Let’s see how far you can send it. Warily our hero gets into position. He wants it all to be true. He wants to believe Lucy will be true to her word this time. So he trusts her and runs full force at the football, taking careful aim and swinging his leg hard to make solid contact with his old enemy.

Only to find himself flat on his back once again, having kicked nothing but air so hard there is none left to suck any into his lungs, even if he could get them to work after slamming his back into the hard cold ground and knocking any remaining breath out of his body.

Lucy stands above him, hovering and howling in laughter. Football still in her hands. You fall for that every time, Charlie Brown!

We are all broken. Everyone of us is dysfunctional. We all came from dysfunctional families, some are just more obviously dysfunctional, but they are all dysfunctional to some degree. It’s just the nature of the broken world in which we live.

We carry that dysfunction into our adult life. Unless we make a conscious effort to discover it and allow God to transform us, to transform our thinking, to renew our minds each day with the Truth of who He made us to be, then we are doomed to not only repeat this behavior, but recreate the exact dysfunctional family situation we grew up with, and are most likely trying to run from.

My particular dysfunction revolves around a dad who was performance and results oriented, two much older siblings who acted as more as parents than siblings, another sibling, who, at three, experienced a lot of abandonment at the time I was born (sibling off to college, dad in Vietnam and mom suffering from depression and fear over dad at war) and a mom who struggled with severe insecurity and anger.

That’s the short version. The way these issues play out in my life would take volumes.

We all did the best we knew how to cope with life as it came. But we struggled and flailed and hurt each other in the process.

I grew up believing a laundry list of negative things about myself, including that I was spoiled, lazy, ugly, incompetent, incapable and "bad" — the best way I know to describe the adjective for having feelings, expressed or not.

I coped by avoiding conflict, becoming a perfectionist, believing those around me saw me in a negative light, allowing others to define me, and developed an acute lack of motivation.

When my world fell apart nearly three years ago with my parents’ deaths, my team’s implosion and my subsequent resignation from the IMB, I went into a deep depression. Two years shy of 40 I had my first mid-life crisis. Ah, well. I always was an overachiever in the melodramatic.

It drove me to seek a godly counselor who could help me sort out the chaos in my head and heal the wounds in my soul. The IMB’s Member Care office has the most incredible people in the world! They blessed me beyond words; and led me to the exact person I believe God desired to use to help me grow into the woman He desires.

Through that counselor I connected to a  book called, "Love Is A Choice" and it’s companion workbook. I highly recommend these books to anyone who longs to overcome their past.

Working through one of the chapters of this workbook Wednesday night brought about the epiphany I referred to yesterday. I finally saw the connection between the relentless negative "teasing" I received (and still sometimes receive) from my family and my negative self-image; between my performance and results-driven childhood, as well as the impatience and constant having things done "for" me by my 4 parents, and my lack of motivation as an adult; between my family’s avoidance of talking about feelings and my mom and my’s shouting matches when I was a kid, and my strong avoidance of conflict or talking about my feelings, anger and frustrations as an adult — and the strong predilection of my family to tell me insistently and consistently who and what I am all throughout my childhood, teens and even today (especially that I was spoiled and lazy) with my adult conviction that others see me negatively.

I had never before drawn that correlation. Never. It had never even occurred to me how directly related these things are. Especially the issue of lacking motivation as an adult.

I’ve spent most of my adult life chasing one passion after another. To the point that I came to believe I had no real ability to sustain any passion for very long; especially not long enough to make inroads into difficult areas. I don’t have a career. I have a string of jobs that I’ve found interesting. I’m not a master of anything, rather I’m a "Jackie of many trades" because my passion for each thing waned with time. It got to the point where I finally surrendered to the whispers of my soul and declared myself a couch potato at heart; an observer of life rather than a real player.

But the truth hit me Wednesday night like a shower of cool rain on a hot sticky summer day: I am not that person.

I’m not lazy — I’ve worked my butt off at a great variety of things throughout my half-life here on earth. Nor do I lack the ability to focus or push through pain or sustain a fast/long pace. My consistent service at the sound board at Mosaic bears witness to my focus, perseverance and willingness to do whatever it takes to advance God’s Kingdom. So does my time in India and my time in Cyprus. Not to mention the many years I spent in the entertainment industry, cultivating relationships, learning the various crafts of writing, producing, acting and production, the years I spent pursuing careers in most of these areas and the degree to which I went to stay current within my industry’s ever-changing landscapes of people and projects.

Nor am I spoiled. I had to fight for space to carve out some sort of place in my family. Something I have yet to accomplish. There was no room for me by the time I arrived in my family. We had the oldest, and the boy, and the cute bundle of joy that was a 16 year-old girl’s dream: a real live baby doll to play mommy with. Yeah, I was "the baby". But they’d already been-there-done-that with my older sister. So even that was not original to me. But that seems to be the only job I’ve ever been allowed  to have. Even at my parents funerals there was nothing for me to do. Watching me learn to tie my shoes was not the joyful event it had been for the others. It was a frustration to a busy mom who’d been through this three times already, and to a college-student sister who had better things to do and had already been through that "joy" with the three year-old; and it was a eating into the time a busy high school boy had to practice with his band in the basement. All my firsts were not firsts to anyone but me. And because of this I rarely got to enjoy the pleasure of them. Many times my shoes were tied for me by hurried and harried adults with somewhere to go, something to do and no time to waste waiting for me to learn to do things for myself. After a while I quit trying to do things myself. I quit trying to help with dinners and dishes and I quit making decisions of my own because I was usually overruled, or in the way or whatever I’d done was taken away and redone by a well-meaning adult who just "wanted to help me do it right".

I’m just like Charlie Brown. The promised football was never there for me to kick, so I finally quit falling for the gag. I quit swinging my leg. I quit running toward the ball. I even quit going onto the field.

And then my family wondered why I wouldn’t do anything, and labeled me spoiled, and selfish. And I, never knowing any better, kicked at that ball, trusting they really knew me better than I — because, after all, who knows you better than your family, right? — and squarely and painfully landed on my back, breath knocked completely out of my body.

But I’m not who they say I am. I never was. Wednesday night God pulled back the curtains of my life and allowed me to see myself clearly — or at least more clearly than I ever have before.

I saw a woman who’s been self-sufficient for most of her life. I saw a little girl who learned to fight for a place at the family table, even though she usually ended up on the losing end of the battle. I saw a good student and a good friend reach out and make friends over and over, with all the moves she made to different cities and different schools, enduring ridicule and scorn for not knowing the social rules or the cultural norms or for befriending the friendless rather than sucking up to the popular. I saw a young woman who stood up for herself and refused to go to church when she didn’t know what she believed any more. I saw a young woman make her way in the world on her own; no spouse to share the load, no parents paying the way. I saw how I made a place for myself in Hollywood, carved out a niche uniquely my own. I saw how I went to China by myself, led a team to India for 4 months of research and became a missionary to Muslim cultures all without a college degree. I saw how I’d taken care of everything from bugs and roaches in my home to plumbing problems and car trouble, from small arguments with friends to major rifts with roommates.

And I saw how graciously and generously God provided my every need along the way. Never in the way I expected but always in perfect time.

I saw how God has infused me with an inner strength that is more powerful than anything I’ve come against. I’ve been "hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed." (2 Cor 4:8-9) I have struggled and suffered great pain and heartache. I’ve endured loss upon loss upon loss. And still. I. Am. Here. I. Live. And I live an incredibly abundant life. So rich! So deep.

No. I’m not spoiled. I never was. I’m not lazy. I never was. I’m not bad for feeling deeply all that I feel. I never was. I’m not incompetent or incapable. And I’m not ugly. I never was.

My family will probably continue to insist I was spoiled. And that’s okay. Part of my epiphany was that that belief stems from their own stuff. And they have just as much stuff from their own childhood to deal with as I do with mine. They may never see me as I am and that’s okay too. It hurts, but it’s okay. I don’t have to believe them any more. They don’t have to tell me who I am any more. That’s not their job — it never was.

I now see I am strong enough and wise enough to define myself.

Praise be to the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly
realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.  Eph 1:1-8

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in
order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of
his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. Eph 2:4-7