Be the Star of Your Story: No One Else Can Be

"His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God... and he must be about His Father's business: beauty... and to this conception he was faithful to the end."

                                                           F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It makes no difference where we have come from, who are parents were or how our past has shaped us. We are not prisoners to any of it, or anything. As adults, we have stewardship-- ownership-- of our own lives. We are all sons and daughters of God and we all have one essential purpose in life: To fully become the person that God created us to be.

What I love most about the story of The Great Gatsby is this: Jay Gatsby saw himself as a son of God, with the unique purpose of fully becoming the person that God had created him to be. This was his life mission and no one-- and no thing-- could stop him. His parents couldn’t stop him, poverty couldn’t stop him, nothing could-- aside from Gatsby himself.

 

All it took was one forbidden temptation: Daisy Buchanan. She was just one person and she wasn't intended to be a permanent part of Jay Gatsby's life. But, in his heart, she became just that. She became a codependent obsession who took him off the God-given path he was following and took him down the path of destruction. 

 

Gatsby knew that just one kiss of Daisy's lips would destroy him. He hesitated trying to overcome his codependent obsession, but he fell into that one kiss. Was Daisy to blame? No. Gatsby, like all of us, was responsible for his choice.

And the same is true for all of us. We all have the unique purpose of more fully becoming ourselves as God intended.

As we choose to grow more fully into becoming are whole-selves, life unfolds before us with all of the means we have available to us to help us more fully grow into being the sons and daughters of God that we are.

The more we seek door of clarity, the more we find the answers; the more we look inside of ourselves, the more we find the true beauty of our being; and the more we find the love that we’ve long looked for outside of ourselves. It was never outside. It has always been inside of us.

It’s true that physically we stop growing at age 18 or 19. But mentally, emotionally and spiritually, we never stop growing until we breathe our last breath-- unless we choose to stop growing.

Recovery is all about working each and every day to growing more fully into being the persons that we were created to be. Recovery is about self-discovery, increased self-awareness and increased self-love and self-worth. It’s about taking full ownership of our lives today, just like Jay Gatsby did.

Taking full ownership of our lives means being responsible enough to realize that only we can fix ourselves. It means we realize that we must heal the past and then move forward free from the past. It also means taking responsibility for our own happiness, making all of the necessary changes in ourselves that keep us from loving who we are and freeing ourselves from the old behaviors that keep us trapped in misery.

Recovery also means that we understand that no one, and no thing, can stop us. It means we choose to stop blaming others and stop playing the victim or martyr. People may have been roadblocks and they may still be, But no one can stop us from fulfilling our lone mission to fully become the persons we are created to be.

Only we can stop our growth by choosing to give-up, by choosing to stop making strides forward in recovery and by choosing to fall back into old comfortable patterns of behavior. One way we stop our growth is by taking our focus off ourselves and placing it back on someone outside of us.

Sometimes, like Gatsby, we’re tempted to focus on a Daisy and to place all of our hope back into the idea that someone else can rescue us from outside ourselves. But recovery teaches us to fight this temptation and to return our focus back to ourselves.

All of your answers are inside of you. Become the star of your story by owning your life and growing fully into the son or daughter of God that you uniquely are!