I went into the enemy's camp and I took back what he stole from me

Do you know that if you repeat anything enough times you start to believe it? Even if it is a lie, say it enough and it becomes the truest thing you know. The same goes for truth, too. Take something you know to be true but have a hard time believing. Repeat it enough and it is true. I do think this sounds much simpler than it is, but I did that on purpose to simply get a better understanding. And to get you thinking.

How many of you have been told something hurtful before? Like you are ugly or stupid or something like that? Well if you are anything like me you replay it over and over and over again. Slowly that lie starts disguising itself as truth until after a while you can’t differentiate between that masquerading lie and actual truth. The two intermingle and it all gets blurry and very contradictory. Suddenly you can’t tell up from down and you begin to wonder if truth is even a real thing and if it can be known. It flips your world on end.

This describes all of us in one area or another. As you were reading maybe you were even thinking about that area. We all have at least one spot, maybe more. It is part of being human, unfortunately. As hard as this is for me, I’ll be a little vulnerable here (for the record, this isn’t really a story I share with a lot of people. Just bear with me.) .My one area of struggle for as long as I can remember has been my physical appearance and my personality. In a nutshell, I suppose, what makes up who I am. When I was little, I was loud and slightly obnoxious. This describes a lot of children, I know. I somehow worked it out in my head that I didn’t have a lot of friends or people just didn’t like me because of how loud and obnoxious I was. So I went into hiding. I spent a lot of my time on the computer, as far away from people as I could get. I didn’t like being with my family or being at church. I felt the only way was to just be alone. Fast forward to when I moved to Minnesota for a semester. I was this little eighteen year old kid who was uncomfortable in her own skin and who didn’t talk unless she had to. I would sit in a class of forty people (almost the whole population of the school), never talking, and my teachers would write on my papers “Who are you? Why don’t I know who you are?” But I was too afraid to say much because I had this fear that I would be rejected if I was any bit myself. Well God used that time to give me real friends and to show me that it was okay to be all of who God had made me to be. He valued me and He chose me and I was special to Him, His peculiar treasure. Those four months in Minnesota, I got to see the girl God saw when He looked at me. When I came home, I got to try putting that into practice. Now that wasn’t easy, either. I started reverting back into my old ways of hiding and thinking relationships and vulnerability just weren’t worth it. It was easier to disappear, become invisible. No one would have to know. It worked for a while. But it was also really lonely. After Minnesota, I struggled really hard and entered into a pretty intense depression. I hardly spoke at all unless absolutely necessary, just retreating farther and farther away. One Sunday morning, one of the most defining moments in my life thus far, a family friend pulled me aside and offered to pray for me to make some friends. I had mixed emotions. One part of me wanted to stay in my seclusion no matter how painful it was. The other part wanted desperately to have friends again. So I let her pray, my soul in turmoil. When she had finished, I was a little teary, and she told me, “Don’t worry. It’s going to happen soon.” Not even fifteen minutes later, I ran into a guy I graduated with. He told me he and his girlfriend were starting a Bible study and invited me to join them. That was a major turning point for me. I got to see what it was like to be real with people and to see people be real with me. I got to develop honest to goodness relationships where people didn’t judge me for the crap I was going through and I could just be me. I could be quiet, sometimes shy, and a nerd, and a writer and a Jesus follower and not feel like I was being judged for any of it. I got to see, over the long term—going on three years now I believe, that real friends don’t leave when things get messy. God used my best friend, too, to show me that not only is it okay to be me, but God created me the way I am for a purpose. She even worked to show me those things God put in me that maybe I didn’t see. It changed my whole perspective. And the good Lord has seen fit to keep us together for seven years now, I believe. He has amazing.

                Despite this miraculous work God did in my life, it doesn’t mean I don’t struggle with some of this still. The enemy still works hard to remind me of my past and how that’s truly where I belong. But over the past few days, God has been reminding me of the difference between truths and lies. If you really think about it, you know a lie the second it is told to you. It feels off and just wrong. It only becomes blurry when you let it penetrate, being repeated over and over. The lies that you are not enough, that you are not beautiful, that you are not worthy of love only becomes true when you let it. So the only answer, then, is to let the love of Jesus and the truth from His Word combat those lies. If you will dig through His Word, you will find truths that will beat the lies you are harboring with a spiritual baseball bat. A lot of times those lies are in there pretty deep and will take a while to extract. That’s okay. No one said it had to happen overnight. You keep repeating those truths from the Lord, even if they are hard to believe, because they are true and will crowd out all of the lies. Eventually you will look around and be blinded (in the best way—blinded by the brilliant light) by all the truth you see. And when you glimpse a lie, you won’t even question what it is. Even now, when you know you have spotted a lie, you can stand up and say, “I am a child of God and you have no right. The truth is that Jesus has made me enough, made me beautiful, and His death on a cross and resurrection from the dead proves that I am worthy of love. Get the heck outta dodge. I’m done with you!”

                Looking back at a difficult past of believing lies often makes you feel like the Enemy (the Father of these lies) has taken too much from you. And he has. It is a part of your life that is marred by the lies he told that we kept believing. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not saying that this is your fault. I’m just trying to reach to that place in you and all of us that thinks of the lie(s) and all the destruction and chaos left in its wake. My growing up-early college years would have looked so different if I had stopped the lies because I knew they weren’t true. But the Enemy worked hard to make me continue believing them, repeating them over and over. The good news is, though, there is hope!

                While writing/thinking about my time in Minnesota, I was reminded of a song that I was taught while on my freshman retreat. The words go a little something like this: “I went into the Enemy’s camp and I took back what he stole from me.” Think about those words. The Enemy has stolen innocence and truth and hope and joy. He stole beauty and life and peace. But my Father is much stronger and He wants us to have those things back. Will it look the same? No. But it comes as a beautiful story, unique to you. In your past, you believed that you were not good enough, but Jesus now says to you, “I made you precisely how I intended. No mistakes. And you are good enough. You can look back and think of how you used to be, but then I rescued you and now you can walk in freedom with Me! Your journey from here on will not look the same.” Looking back on your past is never easy no matter what kind of life you have had. But your past helps shape the person you are today. The beauty is that no matter what kind of crap you have gone through, God can use it to turn your life around and help point other people to truth, too!

                In Joel chapter 2, this truth is shared with the people of Israel after they had been through a time of destruction and loss:

“So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten,
The crawling locust,
The consuming locust,
And the chewing locust,
My great army which I sent among you.
You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied,
And praise the name of the Lord your God,
Who has dealt wondrously with you;
And My people shall never be put to shame.
Then you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel:
I am the Lord your God
And there is no other.
My people shall never be put to shame.”

                Guys, I believe this truth is for us, too. All of those years of destruction and lies and chaos that we have faced in our past, God will restore. I don’t know how. I think it probably looks different for each of us. Perhaps He will give you even more life in your days where once you felt no life at all. Perhaps He will give you a platform to share about the pain you went through and the lies the Enemy made sound so real. I don’t know what it looks like for you, but why don’t you ask Him? He so longs to restore the years that have been taken from you because He is a good and wonderful Daddy.