Thankful Thursday -- January 27, 2011

Recently I have begun to realize on a personal level, how incredibly pervasive and destructive verbal abuse really is. Don't get me wrong -- it's not that I ever doubted it was destructive. It's just that I tend to "rank" my abuse on some kind of sliding scale, and by comparison to a lot of the stuff I endured, I figured the verbal abuse was pretty "low" on the scale.

Over the past couple of weeks, my therapist and I have been working on an episode that is loaded with verbal abuse, and while there is some physical abuse as well, the over-riding damage was caused by things that were said, not those that were done to me.

It's caused me to stop and think about the messages I repeat to myself regularly. You know, that tape that runs in my head even when I don't think anything is going on in there. It's the tape that says, "You think your better than everyone else. You're selfish. You're a troublemaker. You can't be trusted. You're fat. You're worthless." It's probably trite, but it is true -- It's easier to believe the bad stuff. 

Maybe that's part of the reason God tells us so often how much He loves. How we are made in His image. That we are His children. Maybe that's why after creating man, He said, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."

So for today, I'm going to shut off that tape and replace it with God's words. God saw what he had made (ME), and said that it (I) was very good. Wow, if God thinks that, what does it matter what anyone else thinks or says.

They were also to stand every morning to thank and praise the LORD. They were to do the same in the evening . . .

-- I Chronicles 23:30

Look for more Thankful Thursday post @ Spiritually Unequal Marriage