Seeing through God’s eyes transformed my life

When we are children it is so important that we have good role models, so we grow up with a healthy attitude about life and our perception of the world around us is clear and true. When we are abused we grow up with all sorts of incorrect beliefs about life and how to deal with things that come up.

My abuser was a parent, and of course, I trusted him.  Why would he lie to me? I learned that fear was just a part of life and natural because I had never seen life any other way. My entire belief system was twisted, consequently, as I grew up all these wrong beliefs impacted my life in a very negative way. What I believed and understood to be true became evident in my experience. Every choice I made was based on incorrect beliefs. This caused all the unhappy events in my life to keep repeating, over and over again.

The only way to stop this from happening was to uncover the incorrect beliefs and discover what is true. As I mentioned in my very first blog, I grew up believing I was unattractive and stupid. Believing that affected how I behaved and that brought me more unhappiness. I tried to hide because I didn’t want anyone to know how brainless and unsightly I was. 

Think back in history when everyone believed that the earth was flat and the sun rotated around the earth. That most certainly affected the way everyone viewed the universe, but it was all wrong. The earth was not the center of the universe. Everything was just the opposite of what we believed.

It wasn’t until I found God and started to learn about cause and effect that I realized how wrong the things I believed were and that they were the cause of all my misery as an adult. It has taken many years to correct those beliefs, one at a time as they came up. Consider this, if you believed that red was red for forty years and then someone told you it was actually green, how would you handle that? You would need to retrain your thinking. Every time you would see Red you would remind yourself that it’s actually Green, but you would still see Red. Changing a belief is not easy.

Well, I believed I was stupid, so as a result, I almost failed out of school, and nothing I did came out right. I was so full of fear that I couldn’t think straight. In retrospect, I understand now that by not doing my homework no one would see how dumb I was. Everything I learned in school I picked up by listening in class. Tests terrified me. I had not studied so I couldn’t pass them. I did get a few answers right because I listened.

I was afraid of male teachers, which made things worse. My father had been a teacher, then a principal, then a superintendent. Believe it or not, education was his thing. When I think back, underlying my school problems could have been the idea that was the only place I could get back at him. I’m pretty sure that was not a conscious thing, but it really made him mad.

I believed I was unattractive and I wore clothes that hid me. I never made eye contact with anyone, I rarely had a friend. I was always in hide mode as I didn’t want to be seen.

These two things coupled with my fear of the human race ruled my existence. I had a hint of what love was, which came from my grandmother whom I didn’t see often. She was killed in an automobile accident when I was fifteen. My only source of love and affection was gone, and I was devastated. 

As an adult, my desire to find love led me down the wrong path. I confused sex with love, not lust. I did finally get that belief corrected, but it took a while.

I led a dual life for twenty-five years. There was the professional me who discovered she did have a brain after all. I researched everything I needed to know about the jobs I was doing. When I was at work, I seemed pretty normal, but after work, I fell back into that troubled little girl who couldn’t do anything right. My personal life was a total mess. These two people were completely separate. I thought I was hiding, my true messed up self, from my work life, but the opposite was actually true. My true self was the one at work, but it took me twenty-five years to discover that and merge these two people into one.

I had to evaluate all my beliefs through a different lens. I had to stop seeing what I believed through the eyes of an abused child and start seeing them through the eyes of God. How does he see his children? As his spiritual image and likeness, I must be like him, and that would be what he sees. I am intelligent; as God’s image, I reflect his qualities of focus, discipline, awareness, wisdom and more. Once I learned how to listen to him, he gave me all the answers I needed.

Our true identity is spiritual, and when we understand what that is and believe it, it becomes apparent here in our experience. When I started to see everything through God’s eyes and understood that I was efficient, confident and intuitive, I started to see that I was not a damaged human being; that was only my misconception of who I was. God gave me the power to see past that, to who I truly am as His image.

When I started to see I had all these good qualities, that they were there all the time, I could stand taller, look people in the eye and come out of hiding. My life started to change. What I believed as a young adult fell away and I started to believe and understand what it meant to be God’s child.

That person I was at work started to seep into my personal life, and I became whole. I wrote about all these things in my book.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, I hope something I said will help you to start seeing yourself differently. You are a precious, innocent child of God. You always have been and always will be. See it, believe it, know it, and live it.