Hello, tender friends!
Chicks know how to live in a way that heals me. I’ve been supplementing their feed with rice and other treats since the garden is almost done, and watching them carb binge so unapologetically has made me cry.
Watching such unadulterated excitement makes me realize all the excitement I’ve denied myself over the years. I treat them with a gentleness and indulgence that I’ve only recently been learning how to treat myself with.
Colossians 3:12 tells us to clothes ourselves in compassion. Mark 12:30 tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. But for that to work out well, you have to love and extend compassion towards yourself.
I don’t know if Amy Poehler is religious and meant this literally or not or not, but she wrote this in one of her recently released books:
“That voice that talks badly to you is a demon voice. This very patient and determined demon shows up in your bedroom one day and refuses to leave. You are six or twelve or fifteen and you look in the mirror and you hear a voice so awful and mean that it takes your breath away. It tells you that you are fat and ugly and you don’t deserve love. And the scary part is the demon is your own voice. But it doesn’t sound like you. It sounds like a strangled and seductive version of you.”
I remember the day the demon came for me. I was 11. I heard exactly what Poehler did: that I was fat, ugly and didn’t deserve love, specifically that I was “worthless.” What welcomed the demon is irrelevant (although I do believe I know what it was). What is relevant is that I didn’t know how to rebuke it until I was 34.
It was then that the Holy Spirit gave me this affirmation and told me to say it over and over, out loud: “I rebuke the spirit of self-condemnation in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” I can’t explain why it took 23 years to get the revelation of this affirmation. I just hope that if this is for you that you will read this blog and start using it as soon as possible.
The tough thing about the spiritual war is that you have to fight it when God tells you to fight. I thought that if I was obedient once in saying the affirmation that God would remove the affliction, but He didn’t. He obviously had the power to, but He wanted me to continuously repeat the affirmation instead of simply removing the voice.
I consequently didn’t vanquish the voice in one fell swoop, but its power gradually decreased as I repeated those words. The voice is mostly gone now, but if I’m around familiar situations/familiar spirits, it tries to pop up again.
This is only one of the voice’s manifestations; a friend at one of my recent writers meetups shared this post during our last critique time: https://www.worshipfulmaker.com/s/stories/rip-it-off
In this instance, the voice told her that she was a bad friend, critical and too much.
The voice could be telling you that you are a bad parent, that you should give up hoping for a miracle healing, that there’s no point in following God’s ways and that following God makes you look like a fool. The voice could be telling you that you don’t deserve the pleasure of another piece of fruit, as happened to me for years. (That was one of the more innocuous things it said, but I try to stay PG on here as much as possible).
My prayer is that you will rebuke that voice, early and often, before the voice gets loud enough to drown out everything else.
Sometimes, in my mind, I can see 37-year-old me crouching down next to teenage me begging her to leave me alone. Go easy, the wisdom of age says. Be gentle with her. Life will continue to be hard on her. No need for you to be so hard on her too.
I don’t know why it took so long to treat myself gently. I’m just grateful that it happened.
Now, when I’m hungry, I don’t worry about not “deserving” a piece of fruit. I just eat.
Ok, that’s all for today, tender friends! I’ll be sharing a post about joining the prayer team at church in Thursday’s post.
Thank you for stopping by, and thank you to the new friends!
Thank you for sharing!
Please click here to return to the homepage.
tea and tenderness 
Leave a comment