The trouble with HYPERBOLE

I love a good story. I love to get excited and excite others with my words. I love to paint a vivid picture and instigate emotion and feelings. I am prone to hyperbole and exaggeration.

Now mind you this is a gift, I know. God has given me creative thinking for story telling and dramatization. I use this in marketing and business campaigns, all good things. I have the ability to embellish and accessorize scenarios with words; a useful skill.

The problem is that it is SO easy to be part of my every day life story telling.

Have you ever witnessed someone who tells the same good story over and over again and each time they tell it, it gets bigger and brighter? I have. Not that I do this mind you. But as I have heard some BIG FISH stories frequently told it made me contentious of my own story telling habits.

I felt the Lord stirring this caution in me some years back and I have long since been practicing sharing my exciting tales with out any truth bending.

But recently I have observed this in a harmful way. As I was sifting through my thoughts of an incredibly difficult circumstance that one of my kids are going through, the words "this has been over dramatized" ran across my brain. I stopped mid-thought to sort of seize that line of thinking. I believe the Lord was trying to give me some new perspective.

He said to me "just as clearly as you know that this situation is one way, because of extreme dramatization and exaggeration, this other person truly believes it is another way." I had to think on that a minute, hmm, then it became clear.

Feeding yourself, quite frankly indulging frequently a diet of exaggeration, dramatization, or hyperbole, skews perspective and the ability to see things as they are but rather as you project them to be. Oh my. Read that again.

At the core of what we BELIEVE is the underlying fragile state of perspective which has the power to skew any truth. This is why several people all part of the exact same incident will walk away with several completely different accounts. All filtered by perspective.

Now here is the caution and insight. Living in your head is harmful. Feeding on situations and talking them into the ground over and over again produces unhealthy feelings, exaggerated accounts, and convinces your innerman of truths that never even occurred. Obsessing over these thoughts, reading into them, then searching for anything to back up or confirm this not wholly true wisdom is SO dangerous.

Internal dialogue is a fair weather friend. When you become engaged in your mind with rehearsing life rather than the actual living of it, I would say you are traveling a shakey path. The thing is your feelings do not know the difference between what really took place and what you are making it out to be in your mind. Your subcontious does not know the difference. The core of your perspective of a person or a circumstance can be completely skewed or changed from things that never really took place, conversations and emotions stirred up in your mind or in the retelling with hyperbole. Add to that any type of external investigation of which you will most certainly be able to find many other stories to contribute to it and you have convinced yourself to believe, live in, and walk through a lie.(A partial truth being the same as a lie.)

This is at the core of woundedness and a wrong unhealthy perspective of God.

The enemy is skilled at this tactic and he only has to subtly help us with the exaggeration or twisting inorder to convince us of a lie. Eve was the first victum of this strategy. And the intersting part is she was so easily convinced.

How is this combated? Simple, God's truth. When the thoughts and feelings seem to overwhelm us and we are shaken to the core over anything, we must stop and force our mind and thoughts to grab firmly Gods persepctive. My good friend Cindy taught me to ask God, what is the truth about this? Asking God for His truth, His persepctive and shutting down my own thoughts and unleashed emotions allows God's words and Spirit to flood in, giving me His perspective. No strongholds then can form. No misconcieved beliefs can stir. No lies can be developed.

Pure truth of the word and God. What do we do until we master this skill, we practice it over and over again.

When you find yourself deep in that mind churning, heart beating, oppresive state, give yourself and your mind a time out. Don't wrestle with your inner thoughts, wrestly with God, not the same thing you know. Another friend of mine Charlene shared she began the practice of her Jesus chair. And she had to get in that chair and not leave until God could set the mind and heart right. Open His word. Read until the emotins fall away and the thoughts become pure, true, His.

I love a good story. Better than that, I love a true story. Holding my words and thoughts accountable is one of the most radical disiciplines God is working in me, oh sweet healing comes from this type of discipline.

So I let my words be few, Jesus I am so in love with you.