I still remember the day my Original Lie took root in my spirit and I began to live by it. For you see this is what we do. We live by it. I was fourteen. I had suffered a lot of severe emotional abuse from my mother and absolute disinterest from my father. My mother had been on a drinking binge in the attic of our home for at least a week. I knew she was drinking because I could hear the bottles being dropped on the wooden floor upstairs at night when I was in bed trying to sleep. And one morning there had been blood on the wall of the staircase where she had come downstairs during the night and fallen and hurt herself. There is a mystery here; children love their mothers even when the mothers are really bad at being mothers. I always loved my mother. I was worried for her, that she would die. I asked my father what was wrong with my mother. He lied. He said there was nothing wrong with her. But I knew there was.
The world immediately became a very unsafe place for me. There was no one I could trust. Even my father would not tell me the truth. I felt myself close the door on myself. Up until this time I had been a happy child, with friends and good at school, achieving, well liked. This one lie that came in the middle of the most vulnerable time of life for a child, 12 to 15 years, caused me to change instantly. I became withdrawn, unhappy, no longer able to achieve. Parents watch for a total personality change in your child, as I had. I became dysfunctional. Severely. I still knew that my parents were to blame, for the problems in our home. That was a truth I did not ever lose deep down inside. But I started that day to live by the lie that I had decided must be the truth; that I was unlovable and it was all my fault that the entire family was suffering because of me and my unlovableness. And I lived more and more deeply in this Lie every year. And because I lived it out in my life, others could feel it and they believed it about me also. I became unlovable. And people treated me as though I was unlovable. It is very hard to get this concept across in writing. I knew deep down inside that I was not unlovable, but because I had chosen to believe the Lie that I was unlovable because that was the only thing that made sense, I became unlovable and lived it out in my life so deeply that everyone accepted that I was who I had chosen to believe I was.
This is the really deep damage of the Lie. Once we come to believe it as a young teenager, we actually live it out and people feel us living it out and believe it about us. Of course they all have their own lies that help them to believe our lie. And from then on they treat us as our lie tells them we are. It is ugly what this Lie, planted and believed at the most vulnerable time of our life, causes us to live as. And there is only one way to deal with it. Come to acknowledge it is a lie and fight it.
I now live in the fullness of my lovableness. In fact I live in the fullness of being delightful, Gods word for how we as women are meant to be.