WHO ARE YOU?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
--Emily Dickinson

"I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam." --Popeye


Gentle reader,

Who are you? Do you know?

Is your identity dependent on your relationship to someone else? Kevin's mom.

On your relationship to a job? Buyer for Cosco.

To your transportation? The man with the Harley-Davidson.

Are you known for your personality? The woman who is so cheerful or the man who complains all the time. For your ability to fake it? Little Miss Perfect. For your talents, hobbies, preferences, ethnicity? The violinist, the Mormon, the woman with 14 cats. The man with the yellow hat. A fellow classmate in Bible college was known as "the guy with the honey bear" because he bought a squeeze bottle with him to every meal.

When I married Jerry, I overheard someone explain succinctly who "Jerry Renshaw" is: "You know, the guy who married that woman in the wheelchair and she choked on a hot dog and died." It was all true.

We have a friend we could describe equally accurately as "the woman from Croatia," "the woman who bakes all those wonderful pastries," or "the woman bubbling over with excitement about Jesus."

Have you let someone else define you, maybe way back in a classroom or on the playground in elementary school: tub o' lard, beanpole, carrots--remember how Anne of Green Gables seethed over that one? Or in high school: jock, nerd, geek. My first husband Rick had a nickname so humiliating to him he wouldn't share it with me in our 34 years of marriage.

Have you let a diagnosis define you? Bi-polar. Schizophrenic. Terminal.

Is that who you are, a label? Reject. Four eyes. Goody Two Shoes. Diva.

Have you labeled yourself? Dumb. Slow. Loser. Mistake. Too (something)? Too clumsy? Too lazy? Too weak?

What was your unspoken role as a child? Troublemaker? Peacemaker? Lost or invisible one? Scapegoat? Everybody else's garbage dump? As a toddler, I saw my role as "comic relief."

List the labels and nicknames you were given. List the labels and nicknames you gave yourself because of messages you received from the way you were treated, by looks you were given, by the kind of attention you did or didn't get. In the way? Boring? Fun, popular, loved?

Test one at a time. Does it describe who you really are or is it a lie? Cross out the lies and replace them with the truth: I am not a (slur). I am Italian, (Mexican, Japanese, Morrocan).

Which ones are lies that feel true?

Bingo. Those are the ones that are deadly. Pastor (now Dr.) Ed Smith was a counselor at a church in Kentucky who met weekly with a group of women who had been victims of incest. Incest victims often feel ashamed and dirty. When it was A's turn to share her story, the other women, B, C, D, and E, would assure her it wasn't her fault. She had been too little to have caused or attracted the incest. But when it was someone else's turn to talk, they would say (and believe) the same thing, "It must have been my fault. I feel dirty." After a couple of years with them, Ed saw a bit of improvement in their self-esteem and ability to function.

He went home and told the Lord, "What am I doing wrong? I don't see 'a little bit of improvement' in the people You healed. I don't see just tolerable recovery. They didn't just limp away afterward. They walked away." They jumped. They leaped. They danced, even.

Over time, God showed Ed the secret to healing that was complete and would last. Dr. Smith developed this into what he called Theophostic (God's light) ministry. (See www.theophostic.com/) The secret is, Let God do the healing.

Dr. Smith went back to one of the women and asked if he could try something. She gave him permission.

First, he asked, "What are you feeling?'

She said, "Shame, self-hatred, unworthiness."

He suggested, "The feelings are like smoke," he told her. "We're going to have God lead us from the smoke to the fire. Instead of running from these feelings, stir them up. Let yourself feel them. Take them captive as 2 Corinthians 10:5 tells us to do and feel the pain. As you do, we'll ask the Lord to take you to the source of those feelings."

After a minute she described herself, very young, in a setting where she was being violated. She and Dr. Smith had dealt with this many times; she would always curl up in a ball at one end of the couch, sobbing.

This time Dr. Smith asked God to reveal to her the lie she had believed as a result of that experience. She told him the lie she sensed God telling her, "I'm never going to be clean again. I'm contaminated."

Dr. Smith asked the Lord to speak truth to that lie in that event, to that little girl. The woman was silent for a few minutes. Then she looked up and said, "He told me I'm clean."

She could have told herself she was clean and she wouldn't have believed it. Fellow survivors B, C, D, and E could have assured her it wasn't her dirt and she would still have felt she was bad. But when Jesus Christ spoke truth to that lie at the age she was when she internalized it, the woman was healed. She walked free of that lie, permanently. It never controlled or even affected her life again.


WHO ARE YOU? (Part 2)

I spent a lot of my young adulthood on therapists' couches while the therapist and I blindly felt around inside my psyche for the cause of my suicidal depression and self-harm. It saves a lot of time, sometimes years, to recognize that God knows the cause because He was there when the event occurred and can take us right to it, that He knows the lie which the victim believed which is keeping her/m bound and can remove it.

When Jesus frees us, we are free indeed.

I was explaining to a friend about Ed Smith and the principles I was learning from the Theophostic training videos and manual. I shared an illustration about a woman cured of bulimia which started at the age of nine when a friend told her she was fat. She remembered she had made a vow at that moment, "I'll die before I let myself get fat." When she saw the connection and revoked the vow, her bulimia was cured.

As I shared this, my friend made a startled noise. I stopped and looked at her. I had forgotten that she herself was bulimic! She said with amazement, "As you were talking, the Lord showed me the first time I ate for emotional reasons was right after my uncle raped me. I had never seen the connection before!" She realized she had fed her body to get rid of the yucky feelings associated with the abuse. God showed her the lie she had believed (that this would heal those feelings) and replaced the lie with truth. Right then and there!

He did it! I wasn't applying the principles. I was just describing them. And He healed her. It has been three or four years since then and she has never again felt compelled to eat for an emotional reason.

In our home study group, Letting God Speak Truth to the Lies You Believe, one lady told all of us that when she sat in church, she felt unworthy of even being there. "If people really knew me," she said, "they wouldn't want to sit by me."

It wasn't the time or place I would have chosen to address this but she was ready. God took her from the feelings to the memory in the past where a lie was embedded in her belief system. He spoke truth to the lie, just to her, while the rest of us waited and wondered if anything was happening. It was some simple truth, something she already knew but which had never before felt true. Something like, "I love you," or "It's not happening now" or "You are my beautiful daughter."

She got a beatific smile on her face and began to sing! As the group disbanded, she hugged us all and left our house singing and dancing!

Hurray and hallelujah!

I know it's hard to believe but in many cases the "technique" is so simple you can do it yourself. If you're a victim or a therapist, I hope you'll learn to let God do the healing. He heals for good.

You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.