The Names I Call Myself

I enjoy the scene in the movie Cars in which Lightening McQueen is practicing his pre-race self talk.

Speed. I am speed. One winner, 42 losers. I eat losers for breakfast. Faster than fast. Quicker than quick. I am lightening.

His self talk is based on something outside of himself. Performance. Excellence on the race track. It builds him up, and will be effective as long as he can back it up. When he loses his step (or spin, since he is after all a car), then the life crisis will start.

The object lesson Lightening provides is that we do need to be validated by something outside of ourselves. Our sense of self is reflected to us. Yet to seek that in performance is very unstable ground. Performance is a moving target, always changing and hard to keep up. At some point you'll find out that someone else is better than you. That's life.

Case in point is my golf game. I don't get to go often, yet still find myself ridiculously competitive when I do get to go. A few weeks ago I went for the first time in months, with someone with whom I had not golfed before and very quickly my self talk went something like this: "you suck, you are such an idiot, only someone dumb would make that mistake" and I could embarrassingly go on and on.

During my diatribe, somewhere between holes 2 and 3, it struck me that I was making value statements. I wasn't just saying my game stunk. I was declaring that I stunk. All because of my performance (or lack thereof). So quickly I had fallen into the lie that my worth and my performance were directly proportional.

Jesus says that the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart. While I would never dream of declaring to another person that because of their golf performance they were an idiot or sucked or were worthless, that is exactly what I was doing to myself. Yet hardly do we seem to want to apply Jesus teaching on our words to ourselves. Maybe in our effort to not consider ourselves more highly than we ought, we just don't consider ourselves at all.

Regardless, performance is a poor foundation to base an identity on. When we perform well, we'll puff ourselves up, live pridefully, and view everyone else as beneath us - a la Lightening McQueen. Poor performance appeals to our shame response, causing us to question our worth and ability to be loved.

Our sense of self, or identity, is reflected to us. But we need something unchanging and consistent. Something solid. That is exactly what Jesus offers. Part of the journey is identifying and discarding the lies that we believe, and substituting them with the truth. The truth that God entered our story through Jesus. That through nothing but His love for us, we have been invited through Jesus back into God's story.

He wants us; He chose us; He loves us; He will not leave nor forsake us. That is the self talk we should be practicing.