I started this blog series a few weeks ago and haven’t posted Part II yet, but here it is!
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy has so much to say about life and the ups and downs that every person goes through and it shows how important relationships are when it comes to handling all of life’s situations. I feel like I’ve been talking about a particular relationship a lot on my Race and I think it’s been something I’ve needed and still need to work on. The relationship I’m referring to is the one I have with myself. A person has more conversations with themselves inside their own heads than they do with any other person. That means that most of my conversations happen with myself and that I have the power to speak life or death dozens of times every single day.
You’re probably wondering what this has to do with the Lord of the Rings at all, but in the Two Towers, Gollum has a very interesting conversation between his two personalities, which is comparable to the conversations I have in my head (without the multiple personalities). Gollum tells himself that nobody likes him, that he’s a thief and a murderer, that he never would have survived without being those things and that he needed his bad persona. After all of these things were said, Gollum tells his bad persona to leave and never come back. He declares himself free from all of those terrible things and wants to start fresh and free with his alternate “nice” persona, however the ring never lets him live his life as a free person.
Like Gollum, I declare myself free from things all the time. I declare myself free from lies that I tell myself and from the people in my life that reinforce those lies. I declare myself free from the feelings of inadequacy that I tend to have. I declare myself free from the feeling that I’m not worth the things I want. Like Gollum, I declare these things and also like him, I find that I am never really free of these lies and feelings when I try to do it by myself. I’m never really free until I relinquish them to the Lord and that’s something that I’ve been unable to do until recently because I was too afraid.
That sounds pretty dumb, but apart from those lies and feelings I didn’t know who I was. I would have rather thought all of those bad things about myself because at least I knew who I was and where I stood. I had something tangible to go off of when I knew something for certain about myself. I knew for sure that I was inadequate or unworthy. I wasn’t ready to give all of that certainty up to the Lord because knowing something, no matter how awful that something is, is better than knowing nothing at all. But now, I’m ready. I’m ready to give up that certainty for the unknown. I’m ready to give up all of those lies because I know that I’m meant for more. This is how I differ from Gollum. I have a way out. I have an amazing God who will take me no matter what shape I’m in and He will show me who He says I am. I’m ready to declare myself FREE. I’m ready to find out who I really am instead of thinking I’m someone I’m not. These last three months of my race are going to be about exploring who God has declared me to be instead of who I have declared myself to be. It’s going to be different to say the least, but I’m pretty excited about it.
