Kingdom Minded or Wounded-Led?

“And so find favor and high esteem in the sight of God and man.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding;
In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.“

– Proverbs 3:4-6 (New King James Version)

Recently, God has been working deeply on me, uncovering subconscious patterns that, in the past, I had worked tirelessly to uncover using new-age methods like Jungian psychology, Human Design, Myers-Briggs personality tests, and both Vedic and Western astrology. The more archetypes and labels I could get, the more I felt I knew myself. I had intellectualized getting to know myself, like many others do today. With enough scholarly support, I adopted whatever I resonated with, feeling I was a good person for adopting so many different personality traits, as I thought this meant having an open mind and would make me a richer character. Everything was based on a deep desire to know myself. I felt like knowing myself was a hard thing to know – it was hard for me to see where I ended and someone else started because I made my empathy my identity. I would over-empathize and care because I felt like my sense of self was tied to that way of expression. This, alongside people pleasing, rooted in rejection and abandonment wounds, led me to overly serve others and abandon my core needs and desires, hoping someone would come in and save me from this self-sabotaging cycle I wrongly identified as being who I was.

Before Jesus, I would spend hours on end mapping out who I thought I was using each one of these systems, delving deeper into divination practices like doing a Tarot card per day to “read” the energy of the day, do love spreads to give me a semblence of hope rooted in fantasy that someone out there was for me, and spreads about my future because everything looked bleaked to me.

I had lost so much of myself after having faced so much evil alone, without the backing of the Lord, although that isn’t to say His grace and mercy weren’t evident in my life. They were, but I was too spiritually blinded to see the truth of the spiritual power I was operating in truly was – a deceptive enemy masquerading as an angel of light that I was emotionally, spiritually, and mentally feeding with the fear, worry, anxiety, stress, and anger I kept feeling but not healing. The Lord gave me a revelation – I had only ever worn masks to survive a world that kept shutting me up, rejecting my essence, and belittling what I had to offer. It wasn’t until I grew up and matured in the Lord, remembering my identity in Him is what defines me, that I realized that my previous thought process was rooted in an intellectualizing, survival mentality – a wounded one rather than a Kingdom-minded one. I was leaning on my own understanding because it was familiar, and leaning on God’s understanding, when it felt like He only clarified one aspect of the issue, which was so difficult for me. I was used to being fed answers directly and moving from there. I was used to giving myself over to something else, so I wouldn’t have to think too hard. But the Lord is so wonderful that He equips us with critical thinking based on His wisdom, and helps us not look at things intellectually, but rather gives definitions of what is happening alongside feeling it with us. Healing with God means going into a process that requires surrender, not more striving to achieve that “healed” reputation. One transforms, and the other is the same as masquerading as something you are not. Rather than forcing a path, God shows you the path to take, which obstacles to take head on, and which were distractions to elongate the warfare period in our lives, so we can take the path not of least resistance, because God doesn’t offer ease, but rather the path that creates an internal transformation of the soul, with the focus on beholding the glory of the Lord

There is a season to everything under the sun; thus, being still before the Lord equips us with the understanding of which time and season we may individually be in, rather than basing it on external factors like social media popularity, monetary wealth, or even good things like a new family, lots of friends, and even marriage. Good things are not inherently a God-thing.

“For after all these things the Gentiles seek.
For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
and all these things shall be added to you.”

– Matthew 6:32-33 (New King James Version)

I wanted to play different roles because I thought that meant living a fuller life, not knowing that the fullness of life would be found through being myself, based not on what I observed others said that they were themselves, but based on embracing the Holy Spirit that God had poured into me, following the specific instructions He unctions me to do. Even if they weren’t completely accurate, I would force myself to fit into these labels of identity because it helped me make sense of my inner world after years of feeling that I was nothing more than an awkward first-generation Mexican girl.

I also felt like a chameleon, which helped me justify wearing different masks for different contexts. I was proud that I could go with the flow, not understanding that what I was actually doing was finding justifications for not having solid boundaries or a full sense of self.

It gave me a sense of control in a world that is filled with constant chaos. Moreso, I was looking to have control over who I am, a form of self-mastery rooted in constant practice of works to prove that I “did the work.” These practices began when dealing with an extreme loss of identity and derealization due to previous trauma. To me, these tools were the answer to transcend into becoming who I was always meant to be. My quest for constantly becoming, rather than a way of life, dwindled into a routine of practicing new-age religious patterns that made me feel that the spirituality I was practicing was tangible and grounded in something real.

Astrology charts could be written out and mapped against time and space, making the victim of such practices feel as if they are an intrinsic part of something greater, something divine. Jungian psychology delved into archetypes that fit easily into the archetypes astrology relied on. Myers-Briggs felt like another aspect of the puzzle, answering the question I kept coming back to: Who am I?

What I didn’t realize was that in my search for becoming and finding out who I am, the source of my quest was not to find the truth of who I was, but to create who I was based on findings that seemed to have a logical end, a logic based in human understanding and occult sources that only lead to deception.