10 Things I Like About Myself

For the month of October, I’m joining the Write 31 Days challenge with 31 Days of Vlogging, where I blog and write for 31 days. My goal is to write on the weekends and vlog on the weekdays. Today’s post comes from the Write 31 Days writing prompt: Ten things you like about yourself.

In the TV show “Joan of Arcadia,” Joan was diagnosed with lyme disease, which everyone credited as the reason for her visions of God and subsequent abnormal actions because she was following God’s orders. After the hospital, she spent time in “crazy” camp, vision and God free, but when she returned home, there He was. God kept popping up in her life, and Joan tried her very best to ignore him and act how she did (or thought she did or thought how she ought to act) before He showed up in her life looking like a cute teenage boy in a brown jacket.

In a scene where Joan basically gave God a break-up talk, He asked something I’d never forget, “Do you miss yourself? Because I do.”

I know it’s a TV show, but I think about it when I think about how I should act, how God might want me to act, and who God created me to be. People have told me (and I’ve told younger people) that when we’re older, we’ll figure out who we are. But that’s only partially true because a healthy person is always growing as a person.

It doesn’t matter what age we are or how old we get, we’ll face something in life we’ve never faced before that may challenge us to reevaluate ourselves. Rethink the lines we would and would not cross. The risks we would and would not take. How we would respond to certain situations.

Rethinking, reevaluating, and reflecting on who we are are all good things because by doing those things, we grow and growth is good. Yet, there are also many things about us that are part of our core. Core personality, characteristic, beliefs, and values. We can’t let all the rethinking, reevaluating, and reflecting replace the core of who we are for someone the world says we should be or someone we think is better and more acceptable to others.

That’s what Joan did. Instead of growing from her ordeal with lyme disease, she chose to try to be someone else because it was easier, less painful, less confusing, less isolating. But see…it’s just LESS.

Do you miss yourself? Because I do.

When we are not true to who we are – the person God created and calling us to be – we are simply LESS. So in an effort to remember who we are, join me in listing 10 things you like about yourself. Here’s my list.