Overcome

Your New Identity in Christ

There I was, sitting in the green room of the Oprah Winfrey television show, waiting for my turn to share with the world how my new identity had transformed me from the inside out. I stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror startled by my own image. The mirror reflected an image of a tall, slender black woman with shiny, wavy hair that sparkled like dew drops on a crisp autumn morning. The chestnut eyes beamed with vibrant life. The air was filled with deep love, passion, and hope. I didn’t recognize “me.”

As I crawled out of bed the next morning, just out of curiosity, I checked in the mirror. I now saw what I had seen hundreds of times before: an under-tall—5 feet, two inches and shrinking to be exact—Caucasian, over forty-nine and holding, work-in-progress lady.

Perhaps it was just a dream that seemed so real to me. Ten years later I still remember the precise details of my “Oprah adventure.”

Confused and baffled by my identity, I wondered: Who am I anyway?

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The Trigger of Grief

In the work of recovery, we address the danger of triggers. Its very word itself suggests the power to cause us harm:

“Something that precipitates a particular event or situation; To set off; initiate; To fire or explode.”


On one August morning of 2003, I encounter such a trigger. The phone rang. My dad was dead.

My grief, for the next year and a half, was an alarming, unexpected reality. And each subsequent “anniversary” proves equally tricky also. Both defy what I thought I would – or should – be experiencing.

After all, coming from an abusive childhood, I didn’t think the loss of this pain-inflicting parent would register as significantly as it did.

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Let it All Go: Hurts, Anger, Resentment, Frustration

…that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.Romans 10:9


Some days I am just tired. Some days I have a difficult time with letting go and giving my worries to God. Some days I have the full confidence I can let God be God and other days I want to wrestle control back into my grip. Do you ever feel this way?

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The Past is Over: Do Not Let It Define You Today

The Past is Gone
Once I learned to trust God with my life and my wills, my trust for others began to increase. I no longer allowed my past to define me. I stopped allowing the people of my past to define the trustworthiness of those closest to me.

I understand now, trusting God to love me despite my past also means I trust Him with my future. It means to believe He is starting something new within me as I rise each morning. This is a process that began with surrender, but that is not the end of the journey for me. I must also turn away from the mistakes of my past and turn toward God’s will.

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Are You a “Cutter” and Don’t Even Know It?

Are you a “cutter” and don’t even know it?

Self-injury, largely through the behavior of “cutting,” is often experienced, in tandem with disordered eating.

But, I am putting it out there, that almost all of us are affected with this harmful condition in one way or another. Sound like an exaggeration?

How else do you explain the many self-inflicted, tormenting thoughts, words or deeds we engage in, on a daily basis.

Have you ever been on a diet? Have you ever said to yourself or others, “I’m too fat?”

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Learning to Trust

Trusting others has been difficult for me. People have hurt me over the years and trust did not come naturally for me as a result. My husband, Patrick, never gave me a reason not to trust him, but still I questioned him in my mind. After he stopped drinking over a year ago, I wasn’t sure I could trust he would continue to abstain.

This lack of trust carried over into my relationship with Jesus. Could I trust Him? Could I take His Word for truth? Could I believe He loved me despite the past I carried with me? I worked against God’s way for so many years, how could He possibly love me?

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Self-created Hells

Let all things be done decently and in order. 1 Corinthians 14:40

Internet surfer that I am, I recently came across a meme which could be described as a drama queen’s motto:

“I don’t want to be overdramatic. But today felt like a hundred days in hell.”


Yes, within the faith community, it is often agreed eternal torment is some kind of reality, even if it is beyond our finite minds.

Nevertheless, we do ourselves a large disservice to ignore our own self-created and contained versions of this most unpleasant torture. For indeed, even those pious Christian versions of us need to admit something hardly “Christ-like” or flattering. Sometimes we like to create our own little Hells. And then we further enjoy tossing others – and ourselves – INTO them.

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Overcoming Worry

“So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”


One Day at a Time
I have a confession to make. Sometimes I worry. I worry about big things and small things. Worry will plant a thought in my mind that my husband, Patrick, may start drinking again. Worry will throw a dart of doubt at me about a job loss. Worry will creep in about something happening to one of my children. My days are not consumed by worry, but there are times that it threatens to steal my joy.

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Know the Difference: Healthy or Unhealthy Support System?

“Know the difference between those who stay to feed the soil and those who come to grab the fruit.”


This sobering statement recently came to my attention. I don’t know who originally said it, but it resonates, all the same.

It has personally factored in heavily as I have learned, firsthand, who was a part of my healthy support system…and who was NOT.

Indeed, this concept plays a MAJOR role for each of us as we navigate our addiction/recovery journeys. It is usually not too long in life, before we encounter the all too common cliché dysfunction of co-dependency, narcissism and/or exploitation.

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Praying the Promises of His Word

The Lord calls us to be “transformed by the renewing of [our] minds” (Rom. 12:2). One of the most powerful ways we can do this is by praying the promises of His Word back to Him, since He has promised that His Word would not return void, but would accomplish its intended purpose (Is. 55:11). By God’s Word we can defeat the accusations and the temptations of Satan, as Christ did while tempted in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11).

The following prayer is one that I wrote over some time as I meditated on a number of promises from the Scripture that the Spirit called to my mind. What I mean by “meditation” is not that I repeated any verses as a mantra, as if they had power in themselves, but that I considered deeply what they meant, that I weighed the meaning of the words, that I waited to see if the Lord brought to mind other verses that touched on the same topics, and that I related all of this to what I was experiencing in life.

As a result, I was able to see something in these words that was greater,

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