I love these two articles from incourage.me.
Showing Myself A Little Kindness
Stop Apologizing for Who You Are
I'm thinking about how we don't often name the one who speaks to us in our thoughts. Even though he can't read them, he gets the gist of us pretty well. He ought to. He's been doing this some 6,000 odd years, and his very first shot at it wasn't bad, so it oughta be pretty good now. It's the voice that has many voices - the voice of our mothers, fathers, grandfathers, countries, churches, friends. The voice that is many voices which always say the same thing. "Shame, shame, shame," in all it's different guises. Responsibility. False guilt. Mama-dom. Good-girl-ness. Daughter-hood. Parenthood. Gifted-ness. Unworthiness.
We're a mess. Yes. But it's not all our fault. We have a deceiver we so often forget to name, and as Hermione said in Harry Potter, "Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself."
Let us name the voice:
Satan. The devil. The demons who work for him.
It's not you telling you that you're a failure at 10:30 in the morning when you've barely gotten out of bed and there are three children screaming about something and you've got appointments to make and there's already a mess in the kitchen. It's not you sending yourself discouraging thoughts about how the book you're writing will never touch anyone and visions of the twenty-five-hundred-million books that already have been written in the world. It's not you passing judgements on the twenty people closest to you in church.
At least, it wasn't.
It didn't start that way. If you're born-again, "the old is gone, the new has come." You are a new creation and you've been given a new heart, a good heart. Your heart is not bad, is not desperately desiring to sin every moment. Not anymore.
So where is all of this interference coming from?
Let us name him.
Satan. The devil. The demons who work for him.
But. Where the sin of the devil becomes the sin of you is where you accept the lie as truth and walk in it. It's when you take up the devil's baton and start conducting his orchestra. It's when you grab his club and start smacking yourself over the head with it. It's when you let discouragement settle until it causes the pen to drop from your weakened fingers.
It's when we take up his tune that we play his song.
And when we don't talk about him, when we live like we're not in a war zone, when we stick our fingers in our ears because it's scary to say his name -
That's when he takes a step toward winning.
These are not original thoughts, though I've put them in my words. They are thoughts I've digested several times over reading John Eldredge's book Waking the Dead. Get a copy and drink the words like medicine. It will open your inner windows and let God's light revive your soul.