Today, we are on week 2 of four weeks of WE CAN ALL BE FREE. This week, we are going to ask ourselves a number of questions around the subject: I Choose To Shine.
The first thing that we want to do is to remember that each week, we’re going to ask ourselves some questions. We’re going to ask some questions, and we’re going to hope that it gives us insight into what we need to do to be in a position of freedom. I have two major questions for you. The first one is, “Do I really want to be free?” And if so, “Am I willing to do what it takes or do I want somebody to magically do all the work for me?”. The second question is going to be, “What steps can you take right now if you really want to be free?” Let’s look at each of these questions first.
Do I really want to be free? And am I willing to do what it takes to be free? Or do I want someone else to magically do the work for me? When I thought about this, I wanted to first make the statement that freedom is complex, it has different layers of healing and different complications around what we may have experienced and dealt with in the past. What it requires us to do is to somewhat step into some very dark, lonely, sometimes broken places that we have not stepped into in a long time. It requires us to really know the brokenness in our families, what brokenness in ourselves has developed over: loss, abandonment, abuse, and pain.
This is not about choosing to see all these things as negative. It’s about choosing to realize that even in this journey, there is going to be some pain. If you’re captive, if you just think about last week, subject of what’s holding us captive, the concept of captive is binding. It means that to be broken apart, you actually have to work at it. You have to actually do an action to break apart from being captive. As we choose to shine, we need to know what we are really willing to do? And that includes going into some very painful, sometimes dark areas to start, and then,
understanding the next question, which is what steps can I take right now? Not tomorrow, not next year, right now that will allow me to actually get to that freedom.
How do I choose that? How do I choose freedom each day? How do I choose to know or do the things that it takes to be free? One of the major ways is to make sure that I incorporate the right professionals that I need according to what part of me I’m trying to heal and break free. If I’ve dealt with abuse trauma, if I’ve dealt with brokenness and abandonment within my family, it’s okay to ask for help related to those areas. You could preferably go to a therapist, talk to someone and have them help you to even create a guiding plan to your individual freedom related to certain areas in your past. Being able to do that allows you to do the work. How do you choose freedom? Here’s my tips for this one specifically, I choose to shine.
How do I choose to do that? Be transparent with yourself. Be honest and vulnerable with yourself first. Going back to last week, if we identify the lies, we can work on them. Once we identify them and we’re transparent and honest, we go and we seek the appropriate help and the appropriate professional. Our girlfriends can tell us how to heal some things that maybe some of our parents can’t tell us how to heal. Even though I believe strongly in prayer, praying away something is not going to make you deal with the issue. Being able to pray and do therapy can be equally as beneficial for your health, especially when it means you’re breaking free of some of those past dark areas that we talked about. There’s no need to blame the therapist for the progress you’re having. There’s no need to blame you being vulnerable and transparent for the problems that you’re having. The work that you need to do will not get done if you don’t do it. I have the pleasure of being a therapist and working with clients at different stages in their journey. It always saddens me when a person gets stuck on the stage of just recognizing what the problem is and not doing anything about it. Believe it or not, it is painful to watch, but it’s also painful to continue to live that way, because in some ways, you’ve identified a real lie. You’ve identified an area that needs healing, but you’re not doing the work to heal it, which means that you’re still living in captivity to that lie, even if you’re aware of it. So do the work. Be honest with yourself and understand that you can’t be in denial about having to do the work. You have to fight. You have to fight with the professional who knows how to fight these areas, which means that you need to follow the treatment that the therapist or professional you’re working with offers you so that you can learn new ways to exist related to your dark areas, related to the traumas that you may have experienced. Make sure you do the work because you cannot live in “I’m fine forever.”
My last and final tip for this area is that you have to be true. Remember that just because something is hard and difficult, doesn’t mean that the choice to shine isn’t there.
