Can God Cause A Paradigm Shift?

I think the stories we tell about ourselves matter.

In addition to writing nonfiction, I also write a fair amount of fiction. I'm currently writing an epic theological fantasy romance, and two of the characters in the story have more or less the following interaction (paraphrased):

Person 1: "I hate my life. I'm flat broke, my former boss is an abusive asshole, I can't find a new job, and if I marry the person I love then everyone in this society will hate me."

Person 2: "All of that may be true. But regardless, God loves you just as much as He loves the queen of our city or the highest noblewoman."

Person 1: "What good does knowing that do me?"

Person 2: "You might be surprised."

This paraphrased interaction more or less parallels my own journey. A few weeks ago I was working with my spiritual director, and she invited me to ask God where He was in those moments in my childhood when I was being abused. At first, I couldn't hear an answer back. God clearly didn't stop the abuse; and so all I could think of was that either He wasn't with me at the time, or He was sad about it but pretty powerless to stop it.

But then I started to think about the question in a broader way. And as I let God expand my conception of the question, and I asked again, I got a simple answer. I could see God in the midst of the abuse, as a voice deep in my heart telling me that I didn't deserve this.

That prayer felt like it shifted something big in me at the time, but as days passed, I started to downplay it in my own head. So God was offering me a different interpretation of my abuse. So what? It still happened, right? The facts of the story didn't change.

But on balance, I actually think that changing my perception was pretty powerful. I've been reading Stephen Covey's amazing book 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, and the first lesson he teaches is the importance of what he calls a paradigm shift. As he puts it: our behaviors and actions are downstream of the lens through which we see the world. If we want to really change things in our own lives, we need to interrogate that lens.

Or to put it another way: the stories we tell about ourselves matter.

Once I read that, I started thinking about my prayer of a few weeks ago in a new way. The rough parts of my childhood sucked at the time, but why do they still bother me today? After all, I wasn't physically hurt. My body is whole and healthy. I've suffered no brain damage, injuries, or anything else that would debilitate me in a concrete and physical way in my 30s.

Instead, the pain that I still feel from my childhood comes, not from the abuse itself, but from the stories I tell myself about it. I tell myself that being abused means I'm worthless, or shameful or defective; and in my 30s, decades after anything objectively bad happened to me, it's those stories that still hurt.

But they're stories I tell myself. They're not objective reality; instead, they're just one interpretation of a past event. And God is offering me a different interpretation. That's not nothing. It's transformative.

I think this is one of the lessons that God's been teaching me the past couple of months. I've been in a long job search that sometimes seems like it's not going anywhere. I'm a freelance author, but I've struggled lately to get into big and prestigious new outlets. I volunteer a fair amount, and one of my volunteer efforts recently blew up in my face.

These are all areas where I'm used to getting my sense of identity and worth. i.e.:

I'm a good provider for my wife, so I can't possible be worthless.

I just got into this big/prestigious outlet, so I must be worth something.

Look at how I helped XYZ person through my volunteering. That must mean I'm not defective.

But as those have been stripped away, I think it's God inviting me to get my sense of identity, and my sense of worth, from something more solid. Getting my sense of identity from my career success is like building a house on a foundation of sand. Instead, I feel God inviting me to build my identity on a foundation of stone: on His eternal love and delight in me. That love and delight cannot be taken away by anything anyone else does or by any failure of my own.

Or to put it another way: in this season where it sometimes feels like a lot of things are falling apart, I feel God using this opportunity to invite me to tell a truer story about myself—His story. A story in which I am loved and cherished by the only being whose opinion really matters, rather than a story in which I consider myself to be defective or worthless based on my own failures or based on what other people have done to me.

That story—God's story—seems like a story worth believing in.

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