Way Truth Life (eBook)

Keys To Move From Victim to Victory

Greg Hendricks (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
189 Seiten
Radiant Publishing (Verlag)
979-8-9872564-1-1 (ISBN)

No matter who you are or where you come from, your future has impactful potential and promise! Way Truth Life is a book about the journey and lessons I learned, from the highs of playing basketball to the lows of feeling completely insignificant. I now know that you can overcome your environment, the lies culture tells you about your identity, and any rejection as I did! I want to share with you stories that will serve as a guidebook to breaking off the labels, thoughts, and patterns holding you back, so you can live the life you are destined to live! In Way Truth Life, you will discover how to: - Have a grounded identity - Create a new narrative - Discover your true family - Have a sense of belonging - Make life-altering decisions - Understand your true destiny

No matter who you are or where you come from, your future has impactful potential and promise! Way Truth Life is a book about the journey and lessons I learned, from the highs of playing basketball to the lows of feeling completely insignificant. I now know that you can overcome your environment, the lies culture tells you about your identity, and any rejection as I did! I want to share with you stories that will serve as a guidebook to breaking off the labels, thoughts, and patterns holding you back, so you can live the life you are destined to live!In Way Truth Life, you will discover how to:- Have a grounded identity - Create a new narrative - Discover your true family - Have a sense of belonging - Make life-altering decisions - Understand your true destiny

There is no question that people who grow up in some kinds of environments can have advantages over others. We see that play out through the schools our children attend, the resources those environments provide, and the opportunities they afford later on. Having played basketball professionally and having coached at the high school level, I witnessed this on a daily basis. If you have the opportunity to attend a major university on an athletic scholarship, or even get the chance to go to a high school in a nice neighborhood, you tend to have access to more resources, better coaching, and more amenities to help really bring out the fullness of your potential as a student athlete. You have access to better education as well. At a government-run school, you tend to have to work with what you are given. Sometimes there are athletic diamonds in the rough that come out of those environments, but usually, those kids have to overcome a whole lot more with a whole lot less.

Have you ever been in a really positive, supportive environment? You usually think more highly of yourself and feel better about yourself in those settings. They are places of hope and opportunity where you can grow as a human being. A positive environment gives you space to explore; you can see that there is more hope and promise for you there, as well as opportunity to go after your dreams. You have clarity. You are free to make mistakes, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep going. It’s a place of nurturing and strengthening for your dreams and passions.

If we are not given very many opportunities or exposed to creative ones when we’re young, we only obtain a limited amount of perspective, resources, or education. Often, we start to look at unhealthy or unhelpful perspectives or resources to fulfill our desire to grow as a person. We’re more susceptible to what people with limited lives or viewpoints think is good for us based on the conclusions they have arrived at through their own experiences. We essentially allow the world to teach us what is right and what is wrong and how to get through hard things—and that can be a very unstable place if it’s not grounded on truth. (We’ll talk more about that later.)

Our environments impact how we think about ourselves and the opportunities we have to grow. The environment creates the ecosystem of how we see material things, how we view and treat each other, how we handle disagreements, how we view sex, how we receive and give love. All of that is being portrayed to us a certain way, whether through social media, television, movies, entertainment, or other influences. It all impacts us positively or negatively.

Oftentimes, environments dictate our limitations without us even being aware of it. These perceived limitations can stem from others’ opinions about us, who they think we are. But they can also come from our own hearts—our fears of dreaming bigger, our thoughts and emotions that go neglected as we grow up. These things can hold us back in life, but they can also be used as springboards to go higher into our callings and destinies.

Understandably some people may be thinking, “Well, this is the only environment I had.” I understand that; I grew up in a limited environment, too. We have to work with what we have. That was my mentality for many years of my life, and it sucked!

I was raised in a home where the mentality was “make do to get by.” We weren't necessarily dirt poor, but we certainly weren’t rich. My mother was a Hispanic single mom who worked multiple jobs to take care of me and my sister. I didn't grow up with a male figure in my house, so as a young man of color (both black and Hispanic), it led me, at times, to feel I was struggling to find a sense of grounding and identity, as well as a healthy environment and belonging in life. Part of me was always wondering who I was and where I belonged. I longed to know where I fit in the world, to be accepted by others, and I grew up having a lot of questions, fears, doubts, and low self-esteem.

We can feel lost at times, and being grounded in the right things is a crucial starting point for finding hope. Everyone wants to feel they can overcome the pain of their past, but often they don’t know how or where to start. They want to experience a sense of “home” wherever they go to feel grounded and stable in an unstable world.

Imagine a storm raging outside, but the house you are in is firm, strong, safe, and even a pleasant place to pass the time until the storm is gone. When the environment is raging around us, we can feel helpless, fearful, and only see despair; we need a home to keep us safe, a shelter from the storm.

Or think of a tree with roots deep in the ground. That tree is less likely to be blown over when storms or high winds come. The deeper the roots, the stronger the tree. Its environment allows it to grow.

The giant redwood trees of California can have interconnected root systems more than a thousand feet deep. They face harsh winds and weather, but they can still survive, grow, and thrive because their deep, connected, vast root systems keep them from falling over or getting uprooted by any kind of wind that blows through.

I didn't grow up in a home where my confidence was built up or where people were really able or willing to model healthy self-esteem. I lived more in survival mode based on not having a dad. My mother had a lot of pain in her life and was always trying to prove her value and worth. Her parents didn’t have a strong commitment to each other, and there was no service modeled in the other relationships my mom had growing up.

When her own father left her mother, it deeply hurt my mom. So she was always fighting to get validation from her dad. It showed up as despair, feeling rejected and pushed away; she didn’t feel she was loved. It also showed up as a deep need for validation that was passed on to me as well. My grandmother had it, too, and she had a big influence on me as I was growing up. My grandfather left my grandmother for another woman after she did everything to keep their relationship together. So that sense of fatherlessness went back a long way in my family.

Growing up, I felt like a sapling in the middle of a storm with no root system. The things that happened around me impacted me deeply, and I felt I was at the mercy of my situation. Have you ever felt this way? Like you can’t get a break long enough to get planted, feel secure, and have peace? It’s like everything you’ve been through, everything that has happened to you, is just beating you up and forcing a false narrative on you, and you don’t know how to make it stop long enough to catch your breath. This is one of the most helpless feelings: to feel as if you are trapped with no hope. However, hope is available, as you will read later.

THE BIG MAN

Later in my adult life, I got a chance to see something modeled to me while I was serving as a volunteer assistant coach in the NBA for the Seattle SuperSonics. And what I saw deeply impacted my life!

I became good friends with one of the players on the team. He was a great dude and he worked extremely hard. He had already won an NBA championship with the San Antonio Spurs. He had a peace about him that always intrigued me. He was never too high or too low, even in the midst of competition. This peace that he had went on full display in a moment that I will never forget and which has impacted me more deeply than I ever could have foreseen. He exemplified what “grounded” would come to look like to me.

We were playing the Los Angeles Lakers and I was sitting on the baseline in front of the bench. And we were getting beat pretty good! The late, great Kobe Bryant was schooling our team, and the Lakers were having their way! Kobe was just scoring at will, and we weren't stopping him at all. Needless to say, the environment this created for our team was not great in terms of hope or morale.

But my friend was just being very positive as he was cheering and encouraging the guys on the court. However, there was one other guy on the team who kept turning to him and saying, “Man, how can you cheer for this sh*% ? This sh*% is terrible. This is not worth encouraging. This is just awful bulls@#*. It's all horrible.”

But my boy just kept cheering and encouraging our team. Time went by, we were still losing, my friend was still cheering, and the other guy was still hating and being very negative. This went on for maybe fifteen minutes in real time, which is probably a little over half of a quarter (six minutes) in NBA game time.

Finally my friend, without breaking stride, turned to the player that was hating, looked him in the face, and said, “Your attitude is not going to bring me down because Christ is my anchor. You shouldn't let it get you down, either, and if you knew Him you wouldn't be hating like that!” Then he went right back to cheering his team on saying, “Come on, guys, keep going, keep going!” without missing a beat.

I remember just staring at this with my jaw on the ground and marveling at the confidence and poise of my friend. Then the guy who was hating turned and looked right at...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	19.12.2022
Vorwort	Kris Vallotton
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
ISBN-13	979-8-9872564-1-1 / 9798987256411

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