What you focus on the longest is what becomes the strongest.

— Pastor John Gray

“You should write books to encourage women.” “Have you ever considered publishing the Bible studies that you have written?” Those are just some the comments that have been made to me in the last number of years. With those and many others I just rolled my eyes or laughed internally. Obviously these people didn’t have any credibility! Because…Mr. Brown knew the truth. After all, he was my 11th grade English teacher. The expert in writing. So when others were prophesying over my life, their words did not hold any weight. However, there was one stranger who came up to me in a conference who got my attention. She told me that God told her to share with me that I needed to write books to encourage others. I had never seen her before. She went on to say that there was something that someone said to me that was in the way of me believing that I could actually do it. How did she know about Mr. Brown?

In the 11th grade, on the second floor of our high school, in the English room at the back of the building, Mr. Brown called me to his desk. Holding one of the papers I had written, he boldly declared to me that I should never take up a career that involved writing because I was no good at it. And it stuck. It was a seed planted that grew over the many years following. And I made sure that I would listen to his advice and I promise you, I foolishly believed every world he said.

We tend to live out what we believe about ourselves. God desperately wanted me to believe differently. Because truthfully, He had put it so heavily on my heart to build up those I knew and didn’t know around me. More than anything, I want people to believe the good about who they are. If I saw someone afraid because of a terminal diagnosis, I wanted to speak God’s words of life, healing, and truth over them. When I saw people shrinking back because of an impossible situation in the natural, I wanted to remind them that God specializes in impossible and to not give up. In doing so, often during my quiet time with God, I would feel like I needed to text someone or call them to encourage them. To give them a special word from God. Or to simply text a prayer to encourage them through a tough time they were going through. It’s like He would unload this special message just from Him…to them. Initially, I thought I was just so easily distracted in my quiet time. It really bothered me that I couldn’t concentrate on the Bible passage I was studying or trying to read. But then I realized that it was because I was spending that time with God that it was there where He was able to communicate those things with me.

A year ago I started doing online Bible reading programs with two different groups. With our reading, we were encouraged to comment on the group chat about how God was speaking to us. I fell in love with this way of going through scripture with others. I would get in the Word and I felt like God was saying so many things to me. So I would share them with the groups. Then it dawned on me one day. I was writing. I was wanting to encourage other women with what God had put on my heart from the reading that day. It’s like God had to trick me into writing so that I wouldn’t realize that I was doing it. I realized I was no longer believing the lie that was spoken over me back in high school. It didn’t matter what Mr. Brown said. If God called me to write and encourage others, He was going to make it happen.

Oddly, this lie was about not being able to write for others. That was one of the ways God wanted to speak through me to encourage others around me. And I have to communicate it through written word in order to share it with you. This isn’t to show you that I have the ability of a scribe. The inability to write just so happens to be a lie that I accepted about myself and lived out. There are many more falsehoods that I have believed. What lies do you believe about yourself? Are you living out that fabrication because it has become a deeply entrenched belief system? My hope is that as we spend time together, you will discover that you have been brilliantly created to do amazing things that will impact the world and people around you. That you will believe it. I’m excited that together, we will work to reach our fullest potential. Maybe you are starting from a pretty dark place. Perhaps you are letting life happen to you instead of living it on purpose. Or possibly you are already running the race that God has called you too. Regardless, I look forward to inspiring and encouraging you to be all that God created you to be. And I know He made you pretty incredible. So thanks for joining me. Let’s become who we were designed to be and go make a difference in the world around us. Let’s make sure we are listening to the right voices. To life giving truths about who we are.

You may not want to give any more weight or attention to some of the words you have been listening to. So when you believe something about yourself, I simply ask you today…”Who told you that?”