Are you Cancelling Your Growth With This Equation?
In math, we learned that multiplying a positive number by a negative number always results in a negative number. It does not matter how great the positive number is, say 1,000,000, or how seemingly insignificant the negative number is, -1. The result will always be a negative number.
What if we applied this principle to life?
I was biking last week when these ‘equations’ came to me. I paused to jot them down and have been thinking about their impact. A positive x positive creates multiplication, while a positive x negative creates limits.
Truth x Love = Exponential Growth and Healing
When we speak the truth in love, everyone gains. Connection, growth, and healing are amplified. How often do you avoid telling the truth because it will be hard, or potentially hurt another? In the short term the truth may hurt, but if spoken in and with love, can build more connection, allow for growth and aid in healing.
Telling the truth without love is damaging. Love without truth is also unhealthy. The love you say you have is built on a faulty foundation of flattery, people pleasing, or straight-up lies.
Truth x Control = Imprisons
The goal of control is to limit others to opinions, thoughts, and beliefs that hinder, restrict, and bind to keep its victims within the scope of the warden’s rule. Truth spoken with a spirit of control keeps people bound in the captivity of the ‘truth-teller.’ Small people and small worlds are the result.
Truth x Freedom = Generative & Expansive
When people are trusted to choose and create with the truth they are given, the most beautiful things result: families, communities, art and music, generosity, businesses, and service. God trusts us in this way. Do we trust others to handle their freedom well? It is dangerous to try to control what another will do with the truth you give them.
Truth x Complaining = Diminishes
Our complaints and criticisms can be the truth about a circumstance or person. Yet the spirit in which they are communicated, the multiplier, is negative. The end result in this equation is the diminishing of others or the situation. It belittles your power to choose love and create change. Complaining hinders progress and lowers everyone’s thinking and production of what could be. Complainers are victims, not agents of change.
Truth x Encouragement = Elevates
I love encouraging others. When we combine encouragement with truth, it elevates. Through our words, others can begin to see a life, a relationship, or a challenge from a higher perspective and face it with courage. They have been EN-couraged.
Without truth, encouragement becomes flattery. Flattery is empty praise with no power to transform, and no courage is transmitted in the process. Flattery may win friends, but it does not foster growth or change.
Truth x Gossip = Poison
What you are saying about another may be true. Gossip poisons our souls, our minds, and our ability to believe the best about others.
Gossip’s motivation is disconnection, control, and manipulation. That sounds a bit heavy for a girl ’s-coffee-date-chat-sesh … but it’s true. I wrote more about the poison of gossip in this email. Check it out!
Truth x Arrogance = Belittles
Arrogance doesn’t want you to know the truth; it wants you to know that it has the truth, and you don’t. That they are right, and you are wrong. Arrogance is not concerned with your change or transformation into more; in fact, that would be a horrible outcome, because Arrogance needs to be greater than everyone else. Arrogance belittles to make you small, crushed under the weight of this truth, without the power to grow from the knowledge.
Truth x Humility = Honors
On the other hand, truth with humility honors others. This combination creates space for growth and transformation. Humility loves to see others grow, change, and transform.
Truth x Connection = Repentance
A healthy connection within a relationship can hold space for hard conversations. Repentance means turning or changing your mind. When someone we are safely connected to shows us the truth about our words or actions, it gives us the opportunity to repent, to turn from our unhealthy ways, and to learn to walk more like Jesus.
Emotionally unhealthy people will kick and squirm to avoid being told the truth. I’ve seen this play out by making sure they are never really connected to anyone who may know the truth about them… or call it out.
Truth spoken in DIS-connection brings more disconnection.
Your words have power. And the spirit behind your words can create or destroy. What ‘equations’ did you resonate with? What would you add?
