The Circle of Life & the Consequences of My Own Actions

I have spent a considerable amount of my life asking God to fix things that, upon further review, may have had my fingerprints all over them.

And I hate that for me.

Because blaming the devil? Convenient.

Blaming circumstances? Understandable.

Blaming other people? Sometimes there is supporting documentation.

But realizing that God is not the problem, the promise is not the problem, the giants are not even necessarily the problem, and sometimes the problem is the woman currently holding this coffee?

Rude.

Yet here we are.

Numbers 13 tells the story of twelve spies sent into Canaan. God had already promised the land to Israel. Moses sent the men to explore it, and when they returned, all twelve had essentially seen the same thing.

The land was good.

The fruit was enormous.

The cities were fortified.

And there were giants.

Same land. Same grapes. Same giants. Same God.

Completely different conclusions.

Caleb quieted the people and said:

“We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”
Numbers 13:30 NIV

But the other men responded:

“We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.”
Numbers 13:31 NIV

Then comes the sentence that has been sitting on my chest:

“We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”
Numbers 13:33 NIV

Wait.

Who told you that?

The giants never called them grasshoppers.

God certainly never called them grasshoppers.

They did.

They saw themselves incorrectly and then assumed everybody else saw them the same way.

And suddenly I am no longer reading about twelve men scouting Canaan.

I am reading about me.

Because maybe some of my biggest battles have not been vision problems.

Maybe they have been value problems.

They saw the land correctly. They saw the obstacle correctly. Their eyesight worked just fine.

What they could not see correctly was themselves.

And whew.

I know God.

But do I know me?

I have spent years learning the character of God. His faithfulness. His mercy. His sovereignty. His love. His patience. I can tell you what Scripture says about Him. I can tell you what He has brought me through. I can look backward over my life and find His fingerprints in places where I once thought He had abandoned me.

God was never the problem.

But knowing God without becoming aware of myself can still be dangerous.

Because I can know that God is patient while remaining completely unaware of how impatient I am.

I can know God is gracious while ignoring how easily I carry offense.

I can know God is trustworthy while still trying to control everything.

I can know God is my defender while rehearsing imaginary arguments in the shower like opposing counsel has requested opening statements.

I can know Scripture and still not know what triggers me.

I can know theology and still have terrible boundaries.

I can know the voice of God and still fail to recognize the voice I use when I talk to myself.

Spiritual growth is not only discovering more about God.

It is allowing what I discover about God to expose what I have refused to discover about me.

And Moses makes that uncomfortable for me.

Moses knew God intimately. Exodus 33:11 says the Lord would speak to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”

This man knew God.

And Moses still had a Moses problem.

His anger repeatedly put him in situations where his response became bigger than the moment. Eventually, in Numbers 20, God told Moses to speak to the rock, but Moses, frustrated with the people, struck it instead.

That moment had consequences.

Which makes me look at myself differently.

Because one of my areas of growth is anger.

Another is boundaries.

And those two have occasionally linked arms, put on matching outfits, and taken me directly to a place God never told us to go.

Sometimes I allow too much for too long. I do not communicate what I need. I do not establish the boundary. I keep swallowing irritation because I have confused being gracious with being endlessly accessible.

Then eventually?

Welcome to the season finale.

Tables are flipping. Internal monologues have become closing arguments. Everybody is confused about why Jazmin went from zero to Old Testament.

Except Jazmin was not at zero.

Jazmin was at 97 for three weeks and failed to tell anybody.

That is self awareness.

Knowing God does not excuse me from knowing myself.

In fact, knowing Him should make me brave enough to look at myself honestly.

Where am I easily triggered?

Where do I need boundaries?

Where do I become defensive?

Where am I assuming rejection?

Where am I calling something discernment that is actually fear?

Where am I calling something spiritual warfare that is actually the consequence of my own choices?

And perhaps most painfully:

Where have I been calling something a wilderness when I have actually been wandering around inside my own thought patterns?

Because I know the wilderness.

Baby, I have decorated there.

Overwhelm has a sectional.

Overthinking has its own coffee mug.

Anxiety has the WiFi password.

I can turn one unanswered text into a seven episode limited series complete with character development, betrayal, redemption arcs, and a reunion special.

And then I ask God why I have no peace.

Girl.

At some point, I have to admit that this is not a God issue.

This is a Jazmin issue.

Israel came out of Egypt, but Egypt still had to come out of Israel.

The wilderness existed between bondage and promise, and it became a place where attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and mindsets were exposed.

Egypt represented what God had delivered them from.

Canaan represented what God intended for them to possess.

But the wilderness revealed whether they could think like people who were free.

And that is where this gets me.

Because I can be physically removed from something and mentally still living there.

I can be delivered from a situation while continuing to think like the version of myself who survived it.

I can leave Egypt and still expect Pharaoh.

I can arrive at the edge of Canaan and interpret every giant through the lens of everything that happened behind me.

And if I am not careful, yesterday’s experiences become today’s authority.

Bad experiences start writing prophecies about my future.

“I tried before.”

“I know how this ends.”

“People always…”

“I never…”

“I can’t…”

And suddenly something that happened becomes something I believe about who I am.

That is exactly why the grasshopper statement bothers me.

The spies were not merely assessing the giants.

They were assessing themselves.

“We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes.”

Their obstacle exposed their self perception.

And mine do too.

How I see an obstacle often reveals how I value myself standing in front of it.

Joshua and Caleb did not deny the giants.

Successful thinking is not delusion.

It does not stare at a nine foot problem and say, “What giant? I see nothing.”

Joshua and Caleb saw exactly what everyone else saw.

They simply refused to make the obstacle bigger than the God who made the promise.

That generation had two categories of thinking standing at the border of the same promise.

There was the thinking that had become normal.

Then there was the thinking required to move forward.

The majority said, “We can’t.”

Caleb said, “We can certainly do it.”

And what shakes me is that the majority opinion was still wrong.

Ten people agreed.

Two people disagreed.

Ten sounded reasonable.

Two sounded radical.

Ten had evidence.

Two had faith.

And an entire generation died in the wilderness.

Not because Canaan disappeared.

Not because God’s promise failed.

Not because the giants defeated them in battle.

They never even fought the battle.

They talked themselves out of fighting a fight God had already told them they could win.

The giants did not kill that generation.

Grasshopper thinking did.

That makes me wonder how many things I have blamed on the size of the giant when the real issue was the size I became in my own eyes.

How many opportunities have I approached already convinced I was inadequate?

How many relationships have I entered expecting abandonment?

How many difficult conversations have I avoided because I decided beforehand how they would go?

How many times have I called myself overwhelmed when I was actually entertaining every possible outcome except the one where God is faithful and I am capable?

My head is hurting me.

Not metaphorically either. My thoughts have hands.

And this is where I have to ask a question I would much rather ask about literally anybody else:

Who is influencing my thoughts?

Because grasshopper mentalities can come from grasshopper conversations.

The people around me matter.

The voices I repeatedly entertain matter.

The things I consume matter.

My experiences matter too, but they cannot become my authority.

Association can produce assimilation.

If everybody around me constantly speaks fear, eventually fear starts sounding like wisdom.

If everybody around me expects disaster, eventually peace starts feeling irresponsible.

If everybody around me sees themselves as powerless, eventually I can forget who God says I am too.

Which brings me to Simba.

Because apparently The Lion King has entered the Bible study.

Simba was royalty the entire time.

His location did not change his identity.

His shame did not change his identity.

His exile did not change his identity.

Scar’s opinion did not change his identity.

But Simba lived beneath his identity because he believed the wrong voice.

Scar convinced Simba that his past disqualified him from his future, and Simba ran away from the very place he was born to occupy.

Sound familiar?

Because sometimes the enemy does not have to steal my promise.

He just has to distort my perception of myself enough that I walk away from it voluntarily.

Simba did not need a new identity.

He needed to remember.

“You have forgotten who you are.”

And maybe that is part of what God has been doing in me.

Not simply showing me more of who He is.

Showing me who I am.

Showing me where my thinking is distorted.

Showing me where my anger needs maturity.

Showing me where my boundaries need strengthening.

Showing me where overwhelm has become familiar enough that I mistake it for personality.

Showing me where overthinking has disguised itself as preparation.

Showing me where I have been listening to Scar while asking God why Pride Rock feels so far away.

God’s will is multifaceted.

There are things He has determined to accomplish independent of me. Salvation itself is His work. His sovereignty does not need my assistance.

But there are also things God desires for me to experience, walk in, steward, and possess that require my participation.

Canaan was promised.

Israel still had to walk into it.

The promise did not eliminate participation.

And perhaps that is where I have gotten frustrated sometimes.

I want God to change my thinking while I keep feeding the same thoughts.

I want Him to give me peace while I keep entertaining assumptions.

I want healthy relationships while refusing to communicate healthy boundaries.

I want emotional maturity without sitting with the uncomfortable parts of myself.

I want Canaan with curbside pickup.

Respectfully.

But there are some things God will do for me, and there are some places where His grace empowers me to participate.

I have to challenge the thought.

I have to set the boundary.

I have to stop allowing old experiences to predict new outcomes.

I have to stop making assumptions about what I can do based on a version of me I have already outgrown.

Because there is a me in me that I have not met yet.

That sentence gives me hope.

There is a version of me on the other side of this thinking.

A version who does not need to rehearse every possible catastrophe.

A version who communicates before resentment accumulates.

A version who can recognize anger without letting anger drive.

A version who sees giants and does not immediately shrink herself.

A version who knows that being overwhelmed is a state, not an identity.

A version who remembers who she is.

And maybe the wilderness has lasted longer than I wanted because God has been gracious enough not to let me drag a grasshopper mentality into a place that requires Joshua and Caleb thinking.

Because Canaan does not need a different God.

It requires me to believe the God I already know.

And perhaps to finally believe differently about the woman He created too.

So no, I am not blaming God for this one.

I am not even blaming the giants.

I am checking the mirror.

Because the quality of my life is not determined only by what I believe about God.

It is also affected by what I believe about me.

God was never the problem.

The promise was never the problem.

Sometimes the giant was not even the problem.

Sometimes I stood at the edge of something God called mine, looked at myself through the eyes of fear, and whispered:

“I’m just a grasshopper.”

But God never said that.

So maybe it is time I stop saying it too.

The wilderness does not get to become my permanent address just because I learned how to survive there.

I know God.

Now I am learning me.

And apparently, that woman has some giants to meet.

Maybe I have spent too much time staring at the shadows, forgetting what Mufasa was trying to teach Simba all along.

There is more territory than the little corner fear convinced me to hide in.

God has already shown me the promise. He has already told me who I am. He has already proven who He is.

So maybe it is time to stop living like Scar gets the final word.

I am remembering who I am.

I am leaving the wilderness.

And baby…

Everything the Light touches?

Mine.

Now excuse me while I go take Pride Rock.