New Mind
Have you ever seen the sitcom ‘Girlfriends’? It’s almost a foolish question to ask but hey, maybe you are one of the few people in the world who hasn’t seen it. Girlfriends is a show from the early 2000’s, I was in my early teens when the show first came out. It was my first introduction to Miss. Big Hair-Impeccable Style and Endless Funnies herself, Miss. Tracee Ellis Ross. Tracee played the character Joan, her costars were Golden Brooks who played young mom and wife Maya; Persia White who played the free-spirited freeloader, Lynn; and Jill Marie Jones who was Joan’s best friend Toni. The show focuses on these four black women living out life, love, careers, friendship, and the trials and tribulations of black womanhood.
I watched the show during my teenage years and loved it! However, it was recently that I was thinking to myself that I want to buy the show’s complete series on DVD and watch the series in its entirety. As I’ve matured, I’ve realized that the content of many of the shows, movies and songs that I grew up loving, I was unable to fully appreciate as a child. I am now able to understand and appreciate the content from these mediums on a much deeper level because of my own life experiences and general awareness of life that we acquire as we grow older.
I want to go back and watch Girlfriends to explore the different topics each episode addressed and to revisit the dynamics of each women’s lives and the dynamics of the friendships between the four women. I want to see how these women’s blackness help me to better understand my blackness as a young woman figuring out love, career and friendships.
As I was thinking this, God interrupted:
(When you have a real relationship with God you can’t even enjoy talking
to yourself without Him interrupting. Lol I absolutely love it though)
“I want you to go and tell people to revisit their
ideologies, morals and principles.
I want them to revisit those ideologies they accepted and developed before they knew Me.
I want them to revisit those ideologies they adopted when they were children.
I want them to revisit their life principles based on who they are today,
not who they were when they accepted their way of life or faulty thought systems.
I want people to revisit their truth and ideologies with their new mind.”
Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world,
but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.
Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
Romans 12:2 (NLT)
There are ways of thinking; ways of living life; different ideologies or life principles that we accepted when we were children, teenagers or young adults. There are false truths that we accepted and adopted before we acquired the knowledge we have today, before we were exposed to God’s truth, before we were exposed to a higher way of living or before the wisdom we gained through life experiences and examining the world around us. There are somethings that are generational in our families; there are some ways of living that our mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfather, aunts and uncles, maybe even sisters and brothers, lived according to that God is calling us out of.
For me there were/are many things but one was pre-marital sex. For Pre-Jesus Deb premarital sex was no big deal. I witnessed the people around me growing up have children out of wedlock. On top of that, I was never taught God’s truth about sex. I was taught that sex was a bad thing and not to do it. I was never taught that sex was an act that was supposed to happen between husband and wife. I was taught that sex was a sin but in actuality it is sex outside of marriage that is the sin. In my new mind, through exposure to God’s truth, I now see the consequences and realities of sex outside of marriage (i.e., soul ties). It is from this place of truth that I am able to sustain from premarital sex. It is from this place of truth that I am able to live counter cultural and change and adopt new ideologies in this area of my life.
That is just one personal example.
What false truths or misconceptions have you accepted and yet to revisit? Is it about God, marriage, finances, friendships, forgiveness, loyalty, love, and the list goes on. The first place to start with those truths we have accepted is what does the Word of God say about that area of our lives.
It’s time to an inventory on our minds!
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child.
But when I grew up, I put away childish things.
1 Corinthians 13:11 (NLT)
Xoxo
Olayinka
