“I am broken.I am damaged. I am defeated. I am depressed. I AM…”

You fill in the blank. In our culture, we are always on a constant search to either define our being or to un-define ourselves in order to avoid societal pressure. It touches at our innate desire to belong, to BE. The word “be” means to have existence. So based on our experiences or what we are currently going through physically or emotionally, we often use the first person singular, “I am“.

But, words have tremendous power.

By saying “I am” in a negative context – broken, damaged, defeated, depressed – , we take the situation and fuse it with our personhood rather than describe what we are battling in our lives. As we repeat it over and over, we feed that into our own hearts to where a situation has become our deep person.

We experience brokenness. We feel damaged by our situation. We are being weighed down by defeat. We battle depression. We are not these things. They are not who we are as a person – the deep precious parts of us are hurting, but those obstacles do not become us.

Just as other people can speak into our lives to heal or damage us, we can also do that by how we speak about ourselves. We battle and experience hardships in our lives in different seasons in our lives, but they are seasonal, not weaved into the fabric of our deep selves. By changing one word, “am” –>  “experience/feel”, you dynamically change of power of the situation over your life.