Lately, I’ve been stretched on many levels. God has put new mentors in my life who are very tough. I’ve been working out with them 5 days a week for the past few months, and they have pushed me harder physically than anyone else has pushed me. It’s like boot camp. It doesn’t matter if I haven’t slept well the night before, or if I’ve had a rough week, their motto is, “No Excuses!” I’ve also been challenged to be emotionally stronger in areas of my life. I told Betty it was getting to be too much, and I wanted to slow down. Her take was that God gifts us with mentors and we don’t know how long we will have them. We need to be grateful and not run from the growth they are calling us to. Here was her response:

You give up too easily. You let the perfectionist take over, and then you go into a depression. When are you going to get tired of it? Stop letting yourself be ruled by your perfectionist. Every time you say, “I don’t want to grow that fast,” I cringe because it’s dark. You want to be in control of your timing and you sit back and submit and fall for that trick. You aren’t making up your mind to work. You’re allowing the perfectionist to take over for you. Only you can make the decision to change. You’ve been saying you want transformation. Do you really want this or do you want to have the perfectionist dominate you? You can’t have both. Either the adult is in control or the controller is in charge.

You’re listening to a lie. There’s a lying spirit in you saying you’re going too fast. It sounds like self-pity. Renounce it and take it seriously. If you let Jesus lead you, you’ll be happier. The self-pity you can’t stand in others is in you. It’s so much easier to see it in others. You’re making up excuses for not being healed. There must be a group of lies that you’ve agreed to that you’re being locked in like this.

“Lord, help AM to get ahold of the lies she’s taken as gospel, and any way that lying spirit has worked on her. Help that to come to the surface. Help her to truly renounce all of the lies she’s taken in over the years and made a part of her excuses for not being healed. Lord, teach her why it is she’s playing these subtle games with herself to protect this part from being healed.”

Give the Lord your resistance to being healed in this area. Pray and try to figure out what the benefits are for keeping this? What’s the lie you accepted here? Pray you lose the ability to hide in this place.

Although I was being called out for indulging in self-pity, when I see it in others, I find it repulsive. Betty had me do the following exercise. She said:

“Now I want you to say, “Betty, I don’t want to be like X.” Say it over and over because in order to get out of a certain denial, you have to say it over and over again. You’ve been judging X and now you see this part in you that’s similar to what you dislike in her.

Say, “I don’t want to accept that I’m acting like X.” But until you accept, and take back what you hate in X, you can’t get free of it. Maybe a part of you is holding her in it by repeating it in yourself.

Image a door and let your adult with Jesus go through that door. The door is like a symbol of that part of you that’s caught in this self-pity part of yourself. Try to get deep down so you can keep asking the Lord to help you get free of this.   As long as you deny it, you can’t let it go.

The lying spirits are forever telling us how to save ourselves from pain and suffering, but don’t listen to them. They aren’t your best directors. “Lord, help AM to face this self-pity part of herself and no longer desire to let it control her or project it out into X and anybody else she chooses to project it into. “

The self-pity part is coming up because you’re trying to stop it. It was so convenient to project it into others. You have to take responsibility for it. Projecting is so much easier. It’s Lent! Give up your projections and own them as yours instead of as others.

Come out of denial. Smell the stink of the self-pity coming out of you. You can’t run away from it , because you have to live in it. When you project, you can push people away rather than look at it. It doesn’t work that way. If you work through this immature part, your life will be more peaceful. Those emotions can be dictators. The perfectionist is forever telling you and everyone else what to do.

“Lord, may you be the Lord of her life and not this part of herself that she’s put in charge, trying to control others, and at the same time stealing from her. Help these parts get exposed for what they are. We pray that all the people we are praying for can get freed and that the enemy may no longer succeed playing these games with them and that they cooperate with the Lord in order to be able own these parts of themselves in need of healing.”