What Role Are You Playing?

I wanted to share today's devotional from Ransomed Heart below. This is so very true. I have learned that I have so much to learn, but I want to live from my heart. It is hard and takes courage to be open (not hiding), to be vulnerable (it opens you up to possible hurt), to be real and honest with The Lord and with others (not striving to be in control). I truly want to be me, not put on a false self, but be the woman God has created me to be, the one He is constantly working on. That is what I have tried to do through this blog. It truly is about Jesus, loving and serving Him from the heart which in turn makes you want to love and serve others from the heart. I don't know if anyone reads these blogs, I rarely get a comment, so I have no way of knowing. But I do hope, in some way, it has touched peoples lives and that they have been drawn closer to Jesus, closer to His heart, become more intimate with Him, opened their heart more to Him and to others because of some things that have been shared here. Oh how I love Him, the one who saved me, the one who gave His all for me, the one who filled my heart with love to give and to share............Tam

John Eldredge - The Sacred Romance
"We come into the world with a longing to be known and a deep-seated fear that we aren’t what we should be. We are set up for a crisis of identity. And then, says Frederick Buechner, the world goes to work:

Starting with the rather too pretty young woman and the charming but rather unstable young man, who together know no more about being parents than they do the far side of the moon, the world sets in to making us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all. Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather. (Telling Secrets)

Think about the part you find yourself playing, the self you put on like a costume. Who cast you in this role? Most of us are living out a script that someone else has written for us. We’ve not been invited to live from our heart, to be who we truly are, so we put on these false selves hoping to offer something more acceptable to the world, something functional. We learn our roles starting very young and we learn them well." (The Sacred Romance , 84–85)