“Just stay in bed. Don’t get up. Why would you add to the world, you’re a burden. You’re too much, you’re too cliché, rhyming girl with world. You have nothing to offer, you have nothing to say. The songs that they liked were a one time thing, the video’s will fade. Just stay in bed. Don’t get up. Don’t brush your hair. Don’t eat. Don’t sleep. Just stare at the wall and think. About the most awkward things you ever said. Ruminate over the worst parts of your day. Start a cycle of pain, fear, and doubt where you can’t function or process freedom or being freed from the weight that’s on you. Heavier than shame. Heavier than pain. Because it bares the reality of every negativity ever named. Don’t text your friends. Give it weeks at a time. Don’t answer your phone, let it ring. But push that little button so it rings on silent. So people think you’re busy changing the world. So people think you’re busy writing songs, when you’re really in a dark, quiet room staring at a wall.”
This is an excerpt from Jamie Grace’s spoken word titled “truth”. In this section she is sharing some of the thoughts that run through her mind that she chooses to let truth speak over.
This section in particular resonates with me on a personal level. Because for five years of my life my mind said a lot of the same things. My mind has told me a lot of the same lies. And I can say from experience that those thoughts are a sticky, entangling web that wraps you up tighter each day you’re in it. And as they close in around you, you gradually loose the will to fight against them. It is a nasty cycle.
When Jamie later in the same work says, “I fight a daily battle, and I make a daily choice. In the discombobulated truth that is my world, when I don’t always believe it, and even when I don’t know how, I choose to let truth have the final word”, I only too truly understand and agree with what she’s saying. It is a choice and a battle that must be faced every day. I fight, not to ignore the lies, but to acknowledge them and choose truth instead. It is an exhausting choice, and each day I have to ask God for new strength. And some days it’s all I can do to call on the Lord to guard my mind because I can’t take another day of hearing those thoughts.
Sometimes I have to choose a truth before I even believe it. I have walked through times when I didn’t know how to choose truth, but God in His faithfulness kept speaking it over me so I wouldn’t forget it. In many things in has become easier to combat the lies because the more I chose truth in the face of the lie, the more my brain became trained to go to the truth. There are also still many things that my mind is still set to the default of this world. Where I want to accept the lie and distrust the truth. But daily God helps me choose to fight, to choose the truth and take captive the lies.
“So when my mind starts to wonder and my thoughts start to scream, I let them have their moment to open the show because this gig doesn’t pay a thing…, and I let truth step up to the mic and be the headliner.”
If you haven’t heard “truth” by Jamie Grace, I highly recommend you listen to it. I will attach the link to the video on YouTube below.
