What story are you telling yourself about your struggles?

​When life gets difficult, what often stands in our way of overcoming that difficult is the story we tell ourselves about it.

I don't know what it is about life, but when I tell myself I deserve my hardships, when I tell myself they are my fault, when I tell myself others were made for life's blessings and I am here for life's curses, life always seems to agree with me.

Life always seems more than willing to let me keep writing a negative story on my heart and in my soul - totally uninterrupted.

It's when I tell myself a story that is stronger than my situation, is more beautiful than my challenges, is full of more goodness than life feels full of in the moment, it's then that life interrupts and says, "I'm not so sure about that."

Life hands you a pen when you're writing a story of hopelessness. It snatches that pen AND your paper and wads it up and throws it across a room into a trashcan when you begin writing a story of hope.

The key to life, and beauty and goodness, is knowing that truth about life.

It's knowing to always keep another pen and piece of paper on hand so you can keep on writing when life tries to interject.

It's being reminded that we were created for beauty and goodness, and for whatever reason that life sometimes wants to stand in the way of that, that reason isn't a good enough reason to quit being our worth.

Not FINDING our worth, but BEING our worth.

Because our worth was established in our creation. The creator of all goodness and beauty declared it so with our mere presence. The stories we tell ourselves to the contrary, they can't make that declaration any more unloving or untrue than the moment it was declared.

That's our weapon when life disagrees with our stories of hope.

That's our weapon when we fight against life and go about creating goodness and beauty in the world, for ourselves and for others.

It's what we were made for.

It is our worth.

That - THAT is the truest story we can all tell ourselves.