Jesus taught me how to fight.
by Anna Tran
I used to hate seeing myself in the mirror.
It wasn’t always that way. But like a weed left unattended will eventually take over your whole garden, a lie left unattended will take over your mind.
When I trace it back, it started at a very young age.
I was different from everyone at my school. My skin, my hair, and my eyes are all topics of unwelcome conversation. They joked about my mother tongue, my parents’ occupations and asked silly questions like ‘whether I was related to Jackie Chan’? (I mean, I would have LOVED to have been related to that legend, but no).
As they pointed at me with their jokes, the lies that were whispered were ones that challenged the very core of the Creator’s design of me.
‘Did He make a mistake? Am I really that unusual? Am I in the wrong place?’
My light dimmed before it had the chance to shine. My aim in life was distorted to ‘getting by without drawing any attention’. Peace was the goal, and invisibility was the method.
‘Keep quiet, don’t draw attention, blend in and be like the crowd’
Soon, I wanted to be invisible not only to the world but to myself.
When I looked, I only saw what they couldn’t love, and in time, I too found what I saw hard to love. All I could see and hear were the hateful accusations of the enemy. And so, I began to make myself small, But this was not the way God intended for me to live.
He was not ashamed of His creation.
And so, He came after me.
With a force and reckoning that shook the heavens and the earth until He held my full attention, eyes, ears and heart.
It wasn’t like magic; it didn’t happen overnight. But He invited me to partner with Him in the transformation of my soul.
I always thought that my role in transformation was passive. But this is not the case. Jesus invites us to partner with Him in the renewal of our minds and the solidification of our new creation identities.
For me, this meant painstakingly acknowledging every lie that had been accepted as truth. Every deadly whisper that I had allowed to land and grow in the soil of my heart.
Trust me, facing the lies head-on is way harder than it sounds. But God gave me a method, and so I followed Him.
This is what He told me to:
1. Write out the lie as clearly as I could.
2. Find scripture that directly contradicts the lie.
3. Write both the lie and the truth into a declaration.
4. Read it out loud over myself every day.
As I sat and wrote out the lies in my heart and mind, I was astonished at the evil that lay behind the words.
I am second-class citizen because of my ethnicity.
I am invisible and undesirable.
I am without purpose, and God does not have a plan for me.
Anxiety and depression had attached themselves to these lies. But God was not going to leave me this way.
The instructions were clear. Write out the lies and make declarations with His Word.
For months, my assignment was to stand in front of my mirror every day and declare God’s words over myself. It became a part of my everyday routine - brush teeth, get dressed, do my makeup, do my hair, do my declarations, pick up my uni bag and go to class.
Day in and day out, I exerted my will, and I declared God’s word over my life.
At times, it felt like speaking words into a void; other times, I felt my flesh physically struggle with the power of the truth being spoken over me. It was sometimes uneventful and other times significant, with an authority rising in me that I did not know was there.
Until one day, it all broke.
The power of the lie dissolved, and the word of God over my life was so strong that it reverberated in my heart even when I was not verbally declaring it.
The words became like a sword I could pick up and use every time a lie was whispered. The door to my heart closed to the whispers of the enemy, and the weeds were removed one by one.
I like to think that in those days I was trained to wage an effective warfare by the Master Swordsman Himself.
On top of that, my relationship with my reflection changed dramatically. I no longer cringed at my own image, but I began to see what God saw in me. I held my head higher, I laughed freer, I looked into the eyes of the people I spoke to, and I was no longer a captive of anxiety or depression.
I was a warrior, I was a beloved warrior.
I am a beloved daughter.
And I began to believe it.
The enemy whispers all the time, accusing you and accusing God. We think that by ignoring the whispers, they will go away, but this type of warfare cannot be fought with carnal weapons. It must be fought in the spirit, in prayer and with the Word.
