Remember my sandwich? Some of you may have thought, “Well, that’s nice that Rev. Randy got their sandwich, but what does that have to do with all of the chaos in the world?” It seems kind of self-centered, right? Here I am worrying about whether I get a really specific kind of comfort food and there’s people experiencing real suffering in the world.
Well, in my experience, our internal stories affect our external behavior. Different people might even have internal stories that seem similar, and they can affect our external behavior in different ways. If I’m telling a story that I’ll be abandoned if I express my wants or needs, I might tolerate abusive behavior or systemic injustice just because deep down I’m afraid of being rejected and not having a place of belonging.
Someone else might have a similar story that they’ll be abandoned if they express their wants or needs and react differently in their external behavior. They might make more demands more defiantly as a way of fighting back against that internal belief. Some people might not even realize that they go into every conversation ready for a fight because they’re carrying around a really old false belief about their own worthiness.
It’s never just about a sandwich. Or whatever little cue our lives offer us an access point. Everything affects everything. Any time we catch ourselves thinking or saying blanket statements about ourselves or other people—especially absolute kinds of statements with words like never, always, nobody, everyone—those are golden opportunities for us to pause and ask ourselves, “What is that about? Where did that belief come from?” And chances are it came from a time when we were wounded or when our legitimate needs went unmet.
I suspect—and I could be wrong about this—but I suspect that when people do things that harm their relationships or their communities, a false belief about themselves is tangled up in the roots of that behavior. And even with our Unitarian Universalist affirmation that every person has inherent worthiness, there are some of us that learned in our first formation that we had to earn love, acceptance, or safety. We learned that there was something about us we needed to hide. Something that threatened our worthiness.
All of those things we “learned” are lies, though. Some of the meanings we made about ourselves and other people aren’t true. And yet we carry those fears or meanings into lots of spaces without even realizing it. If we want to nurture wholeness in the world around us, we have to nurture wholeness within our own being. Otherwise, we sabotage all our visions for beloved community and shalom. We can’t embody liberating love if we keep our selves imprisoned in destructive and disempowering stories.
You may be one of those people who quickly says, “Not me! I know I’m worthy of all the love and belonging and acceptance!” That’s great. Why do you do what you do? There are lots of stories. Not all of them are about unworthiness. Some of them are about being ultra-responsible. “Only I can solve this.” That can be kind of destructive. Some of our stories are about not being controlled. We’re a creative and imaginative species. We have a lot of different stories.
How do your stories affect how you show up? When you behave in a way that doesn’t reflect your life-affirming values, what story or belief is at the root? Where did that story come from? Is it a story you want to keep telling?
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