Soulshine

In his book Loveability , Robert Holden says “the basic fear ‘I am not loveable’ can play itself out in so many ways… ‘There is something wrong with me,’ ‘I am unseen,’ ‘I am not understood,’ ‘I am incapable,’ ‘I am not safe,’ ‘I am not interesting,’ ‘I am all alone,’ or ‘I don’t matter.” Over the course of my life I have experienced all of these fears. Likewise over the past 18 years of my recovery, I have encountered countless numbers of people who have suffered greatly from the same fears. Anytime we believe we are not good enough to be loveable—not even to be loveable to our parents or God—our thinking will begin to nosedive off a cliff into total self-annihilation.  For me, believing I was “not good enough” led me to believe that I needed to be invisible. It seemed logical to me that if people couldn’t see me, they also couldn’t defile or hurt me: They couldn’t criticize or bully what they could not see. So I worked hard as a child to be silent, to breathe quietl...

“I Am Who I Am” is who God is. It is a declaration of the God who lives in the eternal present. God is the God of the NOW, the present moment-- every present moment. God is not the God of the past or the future, but of the present. I am who I am is also all that we can be. We can all say “I am who I am.“ And none of us can be more or less than who we are in this present moment. So it’s important that we listen to and be aware of the I AM statements we each choose to own. Since we were small children, many of us learned, and have continually chosen to affirm, negative I AM statements about ourselves: “I am stupid,” “I am ugly,” “I am fat” “ I am worthless,“ “I am irresponsible” and “I am unlovable” are just a few of the bad I AM statements that have ruled our daily lives. These negative thoughts have produced much misery. And they’ve led us to believe the following: Overall, “I AM not good enough.” As a result, we have come to believe we are unworthy of love, of nurturi...