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.

WHO AM I?

Gentle Readers (I understand there actually are some!),

My husband Jerry and I led a Life Group in our home (twice) last summer. It was called Letting God Speak Truth to the Lies You Believe.

First each person had to identify the lies in hi/r life. We gave each one a piece of paper with "Who Am I?" at the top and then a column of numbers, 1-25. They were to list as many ways of describing themselves as they could and at the end share them aloud if they wished. Some started writing immediately. Others were stumped at for awhile.

Some described themselves physically: I am a redhead. I am handsome. I am left-handed. Others described themselves in terms of their relationships or ethnicity: I am a wife. I am Latino. I am a follower of Christ. Others in terms of their job or hobby: I work at a supermarket. I am an artist.

When the members of our Life Group had filled all 25 slots, we handed them a new sheet. At the top was, Who Am I, Really? or, as I tried to explain to the ones who looked blank, "Who Am I, Feely?

Now they dredged a little deeper. "I'm lonely. I'm angry. I'm a fraud." Where some had written, "I'm a wife/mother," they now wrote things like, "I'm a doormat" or "I'm a d--- good mother!"

A woman who was one of seven children once told me, "Three of us were bad and four were good. I was one of the bad ones." A relative who spent many years in prison told me, "I am a screw-up." I'll bet he had internalized that before he "proved" it by dealing cocaine. Some of these things become self-fulfilling prophecies. A parent pulls a size-2 T-shirt over a child's head reading, "Here comes TROUBLE!" You want to program a child to be incorrigible? Just have everyone who encounters him laugh and call him "Trouble." That'll do it.

Until a few years ago, I would have had no problem filling out a form like that. Number 1 would have been, "I am a writer." Hands down, no question, case closed. Oh, yes, and after that I would have remembered random things like "I am a Christian, I am married, I am a mother. I am a survivor. I am compassionate. I am  transparent. I am stubborn, I am sometimes too controlling, etc."

But writer was #1. That's who I was before I was anything else.

I was born into a family of writers. My great-grandmother was a syndicated columnist. My grandparents wrote books, my parents wrote books, my two brothers wrote books. As an adult I found I had a niece and nephew we hadn't known about--and sure enough, they'd each written a book!

I started a diary when I was six or seven, in a tiny blue ringed notebook. We traveled out west in our Woody and I wrote things like--well, let me quote verbatim, spelling included: "We went to Winkies Brithday (winkie is an ElePhant] he had a Brithday cake for himself It had Oats and bran and Graham Cracks and one carrot." (Then I gave the recipe.) "he is six But They Put One Carrot Candle on because he had been at the Zoo One year. . . everyone got some cake allmost everyone got some I got Two pieces because the man That was Selling The Cake yelled Out get in The back of the line quick before Its all gone so I got in The Back of The line Once more and got One more piese I got at the End of The line Once more But This Time It was all gone. . ." Pretty hot stuff, huh?

When I was ten, my parents had me keep a journal as part of (what my present husband calls) my boat-schooling. I was programmed to be a writer. They didn't agree on some other things but both parents convinced me I would be a writer. And not just a writer. A great writer. I believed it.

Fortunately I wanted to be a writer. When I became a teen, Dad joked about how I would carry my fountain pen and a bottle of ink with me on dates. He said when a man proposed, I'd whip my pen out of my purse and tell him, "Could you say that again? I want to take down the exact words."

Dad and Mom (we called them Skipper and Mum) had a literary agent. They typed up parts of my journal, written when I was 11, about sailing from Hawaii through the South Seas to New Zealand, sent it off to their agent and when I was 14, voila, a box arrived full of colorful hard-backed copies of Jessica's Journal.

I was just taking one of the books out of the box with awe when my dad teased, "So, when are you going to write your second book? You don't want to sit around on your laurels, you know!" My dad was god to me. I took everything he said literally. I believed him when we lived in Japan and ate swordfish every week for three years and he promised when we'd eaten the whole fish we'd get the sword.

So I was pretty anxious until my second book was finally published. It was in Japanese translation so I couldn't read it, they'd titled it Jessica's Journal like my first one instead of To Russia with Love and they'd printed a picture of my mother in the front instead of me. But it was published, that's what mattered. I was 18.

I edited my college yearbook. Over the years, I had 700 or 800 articles published in magazines and major newspapers. I wrote a lot of books that weren't published before my third one came out. It was the biography of a 14-year old who had survived a late-term abortion.

If you had asked me, "Who are you?" there was no weighing of alternatives. I was a writer. Oh, yeah, I was a wife, I was the mother of two--but above all I was a writer. I had become a Christian at the age of 19 but that wasn't my primary identity. Not unless I stopped to think about it.

Then God took my writing away. It was the strangest thing. I would have ideas teeming in my mind and I would go eagerly to my journal or my computer--and nothing would happen. My mind would go blank. I'd sit for hours like that, waiting, paralyzed. I couldn't write. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And the hardest part of the grief I felt about not being able to write was that I couldn't write about it!

I asked my husband (my first husband, Rick), "So this is what it's like to be a regular person? Something happens and you don't write it down?"

But who was I if I wasn't a writer? What value, what worth did I have if I wasn't publishing things periodically? And my journal was my best friend. I confided everything to it. Who would I talk to? It was my thumb and my blanket, my security, my comfort. It was me.

To be continued! (There is a point coming up, with take-away value for you, gentle reader, if you haven't wandered away yawning already.)