Self-Affirmation Devotion – “I am beloved by God. I am created just the way God intended.”
About a year ago I had a flashback to when I was a child, probably around 8 years old, shooting baskets by myself on our driveway. It was a sunny summer day, and I was trying to make a certain number of shots in a row. As usual, I had set the “bar” for myself very high, and I was angry for not reaching my goal. I remember this moment distinctly because I slapped my forearm for my failure to shoot the basketball accurately enough. As this memory played like a movie in my mind, the question came to me, “If you could step back into this scene, what would you tell 8-year-old Nancy?” In contrast to the harshness of younger Nancy, middle-aged me said with gentleness, “I would tell her: ‘It’s all going to work out. You are going to be okay. You don’t have to be so hard on yourself.’”
At our January Mental Health Team meeting, Bekah Hirt shared the self-affirmations that she wrote about last week in her devotion. That list of 15 statements made for a great discussion as each team member shared which self-affirmation stood out to them. Since that January meeting, I have read through this list of self-affirmations several times and each time, it is the last one that grabs me: “I am beloved by God. I am created just the way God intended.” As someone who struggles with perfectionism and self-acceptance, it is this last statement that feels like it has my name written beside it for all to see.
Although this affirmation tugged at my heart, I struggled to write this devotion because this self-affirmation is the hardest one for me to absorb, to accept, and to believe. I decided that a good next step would be to do the actual “practice” of reading and telling myself this affirmation every day for several days. “I am beloved by God. I am created just the way God intended.”
As I started practicing this affirmation daily, the thought came to me, “Do you know how often I have said something positive about myself in 54 years?” I asked this in all seriousness. My answer was almost never. Telling myself that I am loved as I am? A big zero! Instead, I have spent most of my life telling myself how I have failed, not done well enough, and should have done better. I have rarely told myself that I have done my best, been smart enough, fast enough (when I ran), coached well, written well … or generally been “enough” at anything. Even more radical is the thought that I am loved by God just as I am (without all of the comparison and without the “doing”). I wish I could blame my four years attending a fundamentalist church during college for this line of thinking. However, this is my natural personality for perfectionism and my constant drive to be better / be my best. Telling myself how I could have done better has been and still is one of my main strategies for “self-improvement” (how destructive!). My mindset was to never think I have done well enough or “arrived” in any way so that I would always continue to strive and push myself. That is a really hard way to live, isn’t it? I see now that I have been very harsh on myself all these years, and I don’t have to keep telling myself that message. Today I can choose a new approach and I can claim a new message. What if I stopped constantly measuring myself and instead told myself this truth every day: “I am beloved by God. I am created just the way God intended.”
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