On How We Talk to Ourselves

Have you ever heard someone speak and the message just hit you right between the eyes?  This past Sunday I attended another church. My family is still looking for our "church home" here in Texas. I posted about the challenges with that before. Anyway, this other church had a substitute speaker. It was a woman, which was different for me. I didn't even realize she was giving the message until she was a ways into it! The church's regular pastor was preaching at his home church, so she was standing in.

I thought she did an amazing job. She was very well prepared. She had created a biblical time line and put it on the alter. As she spoke, she moved from one end of the timeline to the other, as appropriate for the scripture she was talking about at the moment.

All that aside, one story she told blew me away. Evidently the gal speaking is a school counselor or a teacher. She talked about a fifth grade student who had been cutting herself. She had old and new cuts up and down her forearms. The counselor had to think on her feet about how to get through to this gal. How could she possibly convey to her how precious she is?

Well, she approached it by asking the pre-teen what would happen if the youngster had put those cuts on another student? The gal knew enough to realize that would be wrong, and the the counselor would likely call the cops and she would be charged with assault! What an eye opener that was for her, to realize she has essentially assaulted herself.

There was way more to the message about how we are precious in God's sight, all the verses that talk about holiness and so on. That is all awesome stuff, but what really hit me was how I talk to myself. For goodness sake! I would never, I mean NEVER talk to anyone else on the PLANET the way I talk to myself sometimes!

The message really stopped me in my tracks. It made me realize how I mentally cut myself day in and day out. I am trying hard to put a stop to it by putting positivity into my brain.

What about you? What do you say to yourself throughout the day? Would you talk to anyone else the way you talk to yourself? Not just out loud, but those silent whispers, those thoughts that echo louder in our brain that if we'd spoken the words out loud.