What Stories are You Believing?

Whether we consciously realize it or not, we all have a running narrative going in our minds all day every day. I wake up in the morning and immediately begin constructing, in my mind, how my day is going to go. I start the narrative, and it doesn’t stop until I’m asleep again at night. And, no matter what my story is, it influences my every action, thought, and feeling.

If I wake up and think that I’m going to have a terrible day, I’m more than likely going to be correct because that’s the lens through which I see everything.
If I wake up aware of the goodness of God toward me, I am more likely to see that goodness as the thread that runs through my entire day.

These narratives don’t just start when we’re adults, but begin as children. Those stories that we told ourselves during adolescence have a way of growing as we grow. These are the narratives that we can still find ourselves believing 20, 30, 50 years later that unconsciously influence our decisions.

The good news is that through Christ we can change the narrative.

In the Bible, there was a group of people who remained stuck in an old mindset even though their surroundings changed. The Israelites, though they were miraculously freed from slavery, kept that same slave narrative running through their minds. Many of their decisions were made from a scarcity mentality, instead of a more than enough mindset. They hadn’t taken the time to change the narrative they were telling themselves so they ended up wandering around aimlessly for years and years longer than they should’ve.

I wonder how many mountains we circle unnecessarily because we keep feeding ourselves the same false narratives.

Changing the story we tell ourselves doesn’t mean going into denial about the things that happened to us or the things we’ve done, it just means that we can see them in a different light. We can change the words we tell ourselves daily; we can choose to live in the freedom Christ purchased for us.

If we’ve come to believe the lie that we’re not enough, we can replace that with truth.
If we believe we are unloveable, we can tell ourselves of the love of God.
If we think we’re too far gone for grace, we can meditate on God’s unrelenting pursuit.

The truth is that we’re all believing certain stories, but we have the power to determine what those stories are. My prayer is that if we’re believing a lie that we would have the courage to root it out. If the narrative we’ve told ourselves no longer serves us well, I hope that we would kick it out of our story rotation.

What stories are you believing?

What are you consistently meditating on?

To go Deeper: Read Belief Determines Behavior, Share Your Story