“I tend to go through life trying—in futility, I might add—to create a self each day rather than to simply receive a self each day. And any self that is created by anything or anyone other than the Creator, the God that breathed me into being, can only be false. Any self that I create or manufacture is a false self because it is just a cheap imitation, adaptation, or distortion of the me I was created to be by the One who dreamt me into being before the foundations of the earth” (from Becoming by Jim Branch).
Dear you,
I see what you are doing, even though you think no one is watching, no one knows your thoughts. Staring at the fake worlds on that little screen, the fake selves with their falsely perfect lives. You celebrate and affirm them even as you loathe yourself. Sacrificing yourself at this altar. Letting it be the mirror that defines you.
You stare at yourself in the flat mirror that shows you a flat self, a false self that hides the living, vivid, lovely, likeable you, the you that others see. The you that I created.
You work so hard to make your name, to fit yourself into the thing you think they want. This flat, fragile beauty, so easily shattered, so quickly swept away. It will shatter, daughter, and the shards will cut you deep.
Dear, lovely you. This shame you wear, this name you make for yourself. You see only flaws and failure. And so you think that is all anyone sees. All I see.
The words you speak, the words you think, the words you put to your name on that little screen, they become the vows you live by.
And the harder you try to grasp at beauty, the more quickly it is whisked away.
Beautiful you. My heart breaks.
I wish you would believe that when you are with Me, you will see what I see. I wish you would believe that the world you live for is a breath that will be gone tomorrow.
I will pull you from your shame if you let Me. You will see yourself if you first see Me.
When you turn your eyes to Me, when you rest in the space I make for you, your shame falls away.
When you stop trying to get everything you think you need and just receive the gifts I give, you will be more than filled.
You will overflow.
Because I give Myself, and when you receive Me, you receive also your True Self. The Self that I love, the Self that I dreamed of, that I designed. I smiled over you as I breathed the breath into your frame. I long for you to begin to know the Self I have always known.
Someday, love, the mirror will cloud over and you will know its uselessness. Someday you will speak My name, and you will receive yours—your true name, the one I have been singing over you since the beginning and that I cannot wait to whisper into your heart.
View from the Valley 