As Christians it is our responsibility to NOT hold onto lessons or revelations that the Lord places in us because who are we to judge in thinking that it was only for us? There is power in sharing, sharing in FULL what you’ve experienced through pain or contentment. Commissioning that message to touch more hearts than just your own is exactly what the Lord asks us to do.
Straightaway, I want to impart to you this very lesson that the Lord has been stirring up inside of me. This is the idea of doing relationships better and that doing relationships better starts with YOU seeing and believing in a better version of yourself.
I want to tell you that YOU ARE GOOD FOR PEOPLE. The character that God has put inside you, the things that inspire you, the jokes that make you laugh, the food that makes you turn your nose up, the times you have caused others pain or made the wrong choices, the ways in which you show and receive love, and even how you do relationships is GOOD FOR PEOPLE. Stop thinking that you need to be better in order to help another person or that your life needs to take fifteen different turns until you have reached that point of wisdom to extend to others. Extend anyways.
What would a world look like if people actually started to truly believe they were good for those around them? Not in an arrogant way, purely factual. What if we stopped thinking that we are burdens onto others and considered truthful that what we have to give is valuable to someone else? Wouldn’t our relationships go deeper places? Wouldn’t we find ourselves more freed in knowing in our core that we were made with extreme purpose and intention? That it’s a lie we have fallen captive to each day pretending to be someone we are not. When you open up your soul, your deepest hurts, your brightest joy, and all the other “stuff” that goes with what being YOU entails, you grow people in the best of ways. Honesty provokes a friendship, so alive and unoffendable that there’s growth in the fighting to get deep that sustains it altogether. Realizing you are good for people and putting yourself before others in an “I’m good for you” kind of way changes the whole trajectory and norm of relationships.
Donald Miller says it well in his book, Scary Close, as he shatters the standards of two people coming to know one another:
“I don’t know why it is, exactly, but the people with the healthiest self-esteem are also the greatest at intimacy. I’m not talking about arrogant people. I’m talking about the people who know they are both good and bad yet believe at the deepest level they are really good for people.”
When we subconsciously think we aren’t good for people or disastrous for their souls we find it a burden spending time OR sharing stories with them. Well isn’t that the CORE and most pivotal value/moral of life? Sharing our own story?
Do you see where the issue lies?
Our thoughts have been molded to think we need to have it all together before we get up in front of an audience to speak, or before we take a hurting friend out for lunch in encouragement, or before we write a book, or before we travel to 11 countries to share the gospel, or before we get married, or before we even simply make a new friend. Waiting becomes this constant state we are in and before we even take the next step we think we aren’t worthy to be there yet so we wait. And then all of our relationships suffer. And then we see ourselves as the burdens. And then we wait. And then before we know it we have a million little half-assed relationships and nothing to show for our life. The entirety of what we were able grow in LIFE we missed out on because we were moping around the house thinking we weren’t good for people when we ALWAYS have been. When we assume we have fatal internal flaws we withhold love and makes things a heck of a lot more difficult then they were meant to be.
People are people, yet people assume other people aren’t the same level of brokenness that they are in their people-like manner so therefore people spend their existence believing they are the people who will never be the people that they were asked to be all along.
Don says again about people in their broken states, “They don’t know how healing that could be to the people around them. Somebody god to them and shut them down.”
YOU LOVE PEOPLE BETTER WHEN YOU BELIEVE THEY ARE GOOD FOR YOU TOO.
And I don’t need to keep hitting this home for you in a roundabout way through writing more. At the end of the day we restrict our hearts, we shrink back into our shells because we are so insecure that the person in front of us listening to our words actually has better words to share or won’t want to hear ours. The reality is that we are really good outlets the Lord uses to rough people up around their edges and create a better version of them through WHO WE ARE. You need to know that you are good for people. Not just the people who love you back either. The ones you haven’t even said a word to yet, you are good for them too. And at the end of the day people are good for you too.
As my momma would say, everyone has something to teach you. Every single human on this earth regardless is we assume they are out to get us or not can show us something, but it starts with you looking yourself in the face and redefining the space you’ll create for you to see that in you. Refinement.
Step back, take a deep breath and love people to their bottomless pits, be deep-seated and genuine and be eager to cultivate newness in the hearts of those broken people being broken people around you.
PS. I love this girl (Sylvia)
