The Shift That Changes Everything

There are moments in life when we realize something needs to change.

We may immediately look at our circumstances and think, If this situation would change, then I would be okay.

If my body would heal or if the relationship would improve. If the door would finally open or if the financial pressure would ease. If the people around me would recognize my value or maybe if I could become productive again. If I could just simply feel like myself again!

I understand that longing more than I wish I did. There have been seasons when I desperately wanted God to change what was happening around me. I wanted relief. I wanted answers. I wanted healing. I wanted to move forward instead of feeling like my life had been placed on hold.

But sometimes, while we are waiting for our circumstances to change, God begins doing a different kind of work…..He begins revealing what needs to shift within us.

Not because the pain is imaginary, because it’s not and not because the circumstances don’t matter, because they do. It’s not because we should pretend everything is okay…

But because the hard things we are walking through have a way of exposing the unhealthy beliefs we have quietly built our lives upon.

God uses our uncomfortable or painful circumstances to shift the way we:

See ourselves.

Speak to ourselves.

Look at the labels we carry.

Or the expectations we place upon ourselves.

The stories we repeat in our minds when no one else can hear them.

Sometimes the greatest shift begins when we finally become willing to ask:

What have I been believing about myself that God never said?

A Shift Is Not Denial

Before we go any further, I want to make something very clear. Shifting our inner narrative does not mean denying reality. It does not mean calling something good when it is painful. It doesn’t mean pretending we are not grieving, frightened, disappointed, angry, exhausted, or overwhelmed.

Faith does not require us to lie about what hurts and neither does God!

The Bible is filled with people who spoke honestly about their suffering. David cried out in anguish. Job grieved deeply. Elijah became exhausted and discouraged. Jeremiah lamented. Even Jesus wept.

Biblical faith is not pretending the valley does not exist. Faith is choosing to remember who God is while we are still walking through it.

That distinction has become incredibly important to me.

There are days when I am not okay.

There are limitations I do not like.

There are losses I am still grieving!

There are moments when my first thoughts are not hopeful, polished, or faith-filled. Sometimes they are frustrated. Sometimes they are fearful. Sometimes they sound more like, I can’t do this anymore.

I have learned that God is not intimidated by my honesty, He welcomes it. He does not ask me to deny the struggle. He invites me to bring it to Him.

The shift is not from honesty to pretending.

It is from hopelessness to hope. It’s from condemnation to grace. It’s from fear to trust. It’s from defining ourselves by the struggle to remembering who we are in Christ while the struggle is still real. And it’s from wanting it our way to surrender to His!

We can say:

This is painful, but I am not without hope.

I am struggling, but I am not abandoned.

I feel weak, but my weakness does not make me worthless.

I do not understand what God is doing, but I can still trust His heart towards me is always good!

That’s not denial…that’s faith.

The Lie, the Truth, and the Shift

Every meaningful shift begins with recognizing a lie.

That sounds simple, but it is not always easy.

Some lies have been with us for so long that they no longer sound like lies. They sound like facts. Or worse they sound like us.

I am not enough. I have to prove my worth. I have to earn love. My mistakes define me. If I slow down, I am failing. If I cannot help everyone, I am selfish. God must be disappointed in me. Nothing will ever change. If I’m upset or scared then I’m not trusting God or good enough for Him.

We may have learned these messages through rejection, trauma, disappointment, comparison, unhealthy relationships, or words spoken over us by people who never understood how deeply those words would settle into our hearts.

Eventually, we begin repeating them to ourselves.

And when a lie becomes part of our internal narrative, it begins affecting how we live.

It shapes what we tolerate. It influences the relationships we choose. It determines whether we rest or strive. It affects how we respond to failure, weakness, and limitation. It can even distort how we see God!

That is why we can’t simply put a positive sentence over a deeply rooted wound and call it transformation. We have to identify the lie, confront it with God’s truth, and then intentionally practice living from that God reveled truth.

Shift One: From Earning Love to Receiving Grace

One of the deepest lies many of us carry is:

“I have to earn God’s love.”

We may never say those words aloud, but our lives reveal the belief.

We feel close to God when we are praying consistently, serving others, making good choices, and keeping everything together.

But when we struggle, fall short, become impatient, need rest, or cannot accomplish what we once did, we begin to feel as though God must be disappointed in us.

I know what it is like to measure myself by what I can do. To feel valuable when I am helping, producing, serving, fixing, or achieving. And to feel uncomfortable—even guilty—when my body or circumstances force me to slow down. Limitations have a way of challenging the identity we built around being capable. They force us to confront a painful question:

Do I believe I am valuable because of what I accomplish, or because I belong to God?

Romans 5:8 tells us  “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He didn’t wait until we improved. He did not wait until we became productive. He did not wait until we had something impressive to offer.

He loved us first.

We do not obey God so that we can become lovable. We obey because we are already loved. We do not serve to earn acceptance. We serve from a place of acceptance.

Grace means I don’t have to spend my life proving that I deserve the love Jesus has already freely given me. However, receiving grace can be harder than talking about it. It requires us to stop using our accomplishments as evidence of our worth. (This is so hard for a performance girl like me!) It requires us (me) to accept that God loves us just as deeply on the days when we accomplish very little.

That is a shift I am still working on.

Shift Two: From Labels to Identity

Labels are powerful.

Some are spoken directly over us:

Difficult.

Too sensitive.

Not smart enough.

Too much.

Not enough.

Unlovable.

Broken.

Failure.

Other labels develop through experience. Someone leaves us, and we decide we are unwanted. Someone mistreats us, and we decide we are unworthy. We make a mistake, and we decide we are a failure. We walk through a season of weakness, and we decide we are useless.

But what happened to you is not the same as who you are. You are not the sum total of your choices either!

What someone called you is not necessarily what God calls you. Your hardest season is not your name. Your limitations are not your identity. Your pain may be part of your story, but it does not have the authority to write the final chapter.

In Christ, you are chosen. You are loved. You are forgiven. You are redeemed. You are God’s workmanship. You are His daughter. Those truths may be familiar, but familiarity does not always mean we are living from them.

Here is the challenge:

When you look at yourself, whose words do you hear first?

Do you hear the voice of the person who rejected you? The criticism of someone who never saw your heart? The accusations of your past? How about the expectations of a culture that measures women by appearance, productivity, success, or how well they care for everyone else?

Or are you learning to hear the voice of your Father?

The shift happens when we stop allowing our past, our pain, our performance, or another person to define what only God has the authority to define.

Shift Three: From Shame to Freedom

Shame does not simply say, You did something wrong. Shame says, There is something wrong with you.

It attaches our identity to our worst moments. It reminds us of what we did, what we allowed, what we should have known, or what we wish we could undo. Shame also appears when we believe we should be handling a difficult season better than we are.

We think things like; I should be stronger by now. I should have moved on. I shouldn’t still feel this way. I should have more faith. I should be able to do what I used to do.

Those thoughts may sound like motivation, but often they are condemnation wearing a disguise.

2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us  ”For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

Our identity is not secured by flawless behavior. It is secured by Jesus. That does not mean our choices do not matter. It means our failures no longer have the final word. Conviction leads us toward God. Shame tells us to hide from Him. Conviction says, bring this into the light so it can be healed. Shame says, keep this hidden because no one could love you if they knew.

The shift is learning to recognize the difference.

God may correct us, but He does not humiliate us. He may reveal what needs to change, but He does not strip us of our identity as His daughters. We can take responsibility for our choices without turning our mistakes into our name.

Shift Four: From Striving to Surrender

Striving often looks admirable from the outside. It can look like hard work, responsibility, faithfulness, and strength. However, beneath the surface, striving is often fueled by fear. Fear that if we stop, everything will fall apart. Fear that if we do not fix it, no one will. Fear that resting makes us lazy. Fear that needing help makes us weak. Fear that surrender means giving up.

I have had to confront how much of my identity has been tied to being the strong one—the one who keeps going, helps others, solves problems, and pushes through. But there are seasons when pushing harder is not strength. I have learned sometimes strength looks like accepting our limitations. Sometimes faith looks like resting or sometimes obedience looks like saying no. Sometimes surrender looks like admitting, I can’t carry this by myself.

Jesus never asked us to live as though everything depended upon us.

Surrender does not mean we stop caring. It means we stop trying to control outcomes that belong to God. It means we do what He has asked us to do and trust Him with what we can’t do. The shift from striving to surrender may feel frightening because striving gives us the illusion of control, but surrender gives us something far better. Peace!

Shift Five: From Negative Narratives to Faith-Filled Truth

We all have an ongoing conversation happening inside our minds. The question is not whether we have an inner narrative. The question is whether that narrative agrees with God. A faith-filled inner narrative is not one that ignores difficulty. It is one that refuses to let difficulty become the only truth.

Instead of saying:

Everything is falling apart, ~~ say, I do not know how this will work out, but God is still with me.

Instead of saying:

I am useless because I can’t do what I used to do, ~~ say, My capacity may have changed, but my value has not.

Instead of saying:

I should be further along, ~~ say, Healing is not a race, and God is patient with me in this process.

Instead of saying:

Nothing good can come from this, ~~ say, I cannot see the full purpose yet, but I trust that God is still working.

Notice that these statements do not deny the facts. They place the facts inside a larger truth. Yes, this is hard and God is still faithful. Yes, I am grieving and I am still held. Yes, I have limitations and I still have purpose. Yes, I feel afraid and fear does not get to make my decisions for me. That is what a faith-filled shift sounds like.

You Can’t Change What You Will Not Confront

This is where the challenge becomes personal.

We cannot change an inner narrative we refuse to examine. We cannot replace a lie we continue to defend.\ We cannot experience freedom while agreeing with the very beliefs that keep us bound. So, I want to invite you to slow down and listen to the words you speak to yourself.

~What do you say when you make a mistake?

~What do you believe about yourself when someone rejects you?

~How do you speak to yourself when your body needs rest?

~What story do you repeat when life does not happen according to your timeline?

~What do you believe God thinks about you when you are struggling?

Do not rush past the answers. Do not give the answer you believe a good Christian woman is supposed to give. Be honest. God already knows what is there and He still loves you to the moon and back. The purpose of bringing these thoughts into the light is not so that you can condemn yourself for having them. It is so that God can begin transforming them.

Romans 12:2 says ‘And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Renewal is not a one-time decision AND IT IS NOT striving to prove anything in your own strength. It’s surrendering to allow HIM to transform your mind. It is a continual process of recognizing what is false and returning to what is true. Sometimes we make the same shift again and again. We choose truth in the morning and have to choose it again by lunchtime. We surrender fear today and find ourselves picking it back up tomorrow. That does not mean we are failing. It means transformation takes time and surrender to God.

Your Worth Has Not Changed

Perhaps this is the truth someone needs today:

Your worth has not decreased because your capacity has changed.

You are not less valuable because you are tired.

You are not less loved because you are struggling.

You are not disappointing God because healing is taking longer than you expected.

You are not failing because this season requires more rest, help, patience, or grace than you are accustomed to giving yourself.

The world may measure you by what you produce. God does not. Your value was established by the One who created you and confirmed through the price Jesus willingly paid for you. Nothing you accomplish can make you more valuable to Him. Nothing you fail to accomplish can make you less valuable to Him.

I am still practicing living from that truth. I wish I could say I make the shift perfectly every day. I don’t. There are still moments when I become frustrated with my limitations. There are still days when I compare who I am today with who I was before. There are still times when I feel the pull to prove that I am useful, strong, productive, and needed. But I have come to understand that limitations do not only take something from us. They can also reveal something to us. They reveal where we have placed our identity and they expose the lies we have relied upon. Limitations slow us down long enough to hear the way we have been speaking to ourselves and they give us an opportunity to build our lives upon something more secure than our own ability.

What Shift Do You Need to Make?

Maybe your shift is from performance to grace.

From shame to freedom.

From fear to trust.

From striving to surrender.

From rejection to belonging.

From self-criticism to compassion.

From defining yourself by your limitations to seeing yourself through the eyes of God.

Whatever your shift may be, begin with honesty.

Name the lie ~ Write it down ~ Then place God’s truth beside it.

Ask yourself:

What have I been believing?

What does God say is true?

What would change if I began living from His truth instead of this lie?

And then choose one small way to practice that shift today. Not when your circumstances change. Not when you feel stronger. Not when you have everything figured out.

Today.

You may still be in the valley, and the pain may still be real. That prayer may still be unanswered, but even here, a shift can begin. You can grieve and still have hope. You can acknowledge weaknesses and still know your worth. You can tell the truth about the hard thing and still declare the truth about your God.

You are not what happened to you.
You are not what someone called you.
You are not the worst thing you have ever done.
You are not the amount of work you can accomplish today.
You are not your limitations.
You are a deeply loved daughter of God.
…And perhaps the most important shift you will ever make is learning to live like that is true.