With Friends Like This...

"You're so fat"

"Your hair looks terrible today!"

"You'll never be able to do that"

"That outfit looks just awful on you"

"You're a bad mother"

"You're not good enough"

"I don't think you can do this"

"You're too scared to do that"

"You're such a failure"

"You're not smart enough"

"You'll never be as good as so-and-so"

"You can't do anything right"

photo: publicdomainpictures.net

If you had a friend who talked to you like this on a regular basis, you probably wouldn't be friends with that person for very long.  (assuming you somehow managed to think of them as a friend in the first place) Right? 

Right!  I know, I wouldn't! Who wants to be around someone constantly putting us down and feeding us such negative energy all the time? 

So...  what makes us feel that it's OK to speak to ourselves like this? 

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Raging Waters

The other night while reading "The Zookeeper's Wife" by Diane Ackerman I came across a few paragraphs which described how how a rabbi in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation would teach people to disconnect from their thoughts, as if watching a river flow by.

The mental image stuck with me; and I've spent some quiet moments reflecting on the mental image of rivers as thoughts and how they flow.

Negative thoughts, sadness, doubts, anger, despair - they are all like a flooded river, swirling past us. If we toss ourselves into the middle of any of them, we will be swept away and drown in them.

But if we keep ourselves securely on the shore, keep a sure footing, hold secure in God's promises - we do not have to fear the flood.  As quickly as the raging waters come, they also flow away from us.

"the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away" ~ Psalm 124: 4-5