Are You The Owner Of Your Life Or Just A Minority Shareholder?

There is a question I have learned to ask myself, and I want to ask it of you this week.

Who actually owns your life?

Not on paper. Not in the way you would answer if someone asked you politely over coffee. I mean underneath all of that. In the place where decisions that shape your experience are really made. In the place where you react before you think, where you reach before you choose, where you become someone you did not entirely intend to be.

Who is holding the controlling shares in there?

Here is what I have come to believe after years of doing this work, in my own heart first and then alongside others.

Most of us are not the sole owners of our lives. We are minority shareholders.

We hold a small stake in a company we believe is ours. Yet, the board that actually runs things was assembled a long time ago, in rooms we do not fully remember, by people and events we did not choose.

This is not a comfortable thing to see. It was not comfortable for me. Yet it is, I have found, the doorway that effective inner work creates which leads us towards our freedom.

Who Is Doing the Thinking?

We like to believe we are the ones thinking our thoughts.

We are not, or at least not as often as we imagine. So much of what runs through us in a day was installed long before we had any say in the matter. The voice that tells you that you are too much. The voice that tells you that you are not enough. The voice that flinches at intimacy, that braces for abandonment, that assumes the worst is coming because the worst once came.

That is not you thinking. That is the shareholders thinking. They acquired their stake during your formative years, and they have been voting on your behalf ever since.

When we do not see this, we mistake their voice for our own. We live out their agenda and call it our personality. We defend their decisions and call it who we are.

The first act of ownership is simply this. To notice that the thinking is happening, and to ask who is doing it.

How the Shareholders Got In

We do not start out divided like this.

We come into the world whole. Open. Trusting. Ready to grow into the fullness of who we were created to be. Then life begins to happen before we have any capacity to make sense of it.

During our formative years we suffer pain. We suffer trauma. We move through circumstances and experiences that were less than ideal, sometimes far less, and we are wounded by them. Not because we were weak but because we were small, and the things that happened were larger than any child was designed to carry.

Those wounds do not stay quiet. They take up residence. They take over large parts of the heart, and from there they begin to acquire shares. As we grow, that early wounding quietly buys up controlling interest in the way we see ourselves, the way we see God, the way we see the world, and the way we come to believe our lives need to be about.

By the time we reach adulthood, we are running a company we did not design, according to a strategy we never approved, set in motion and fueled by wounds we have long since forgotten were even there.

This is not a judgement. It is simply what happened. Yet, what happened can be healed.

The Emotional Vitamins We Were Created to Receive

There is a metaphor I keep returning to, because I have not found a truer one.

We were each created to receive a particular set of emotional vitamins as we grew.

Affection. Safety. Attunement. The sense of being seen, being wanted, being delighted in. The steady message that we mattered, that our presence was good, that we belonged.

These are not luxuries. They are nutrients. The heart needs them the way the body needs what it was made to be fed.

Now, here is the part that matters. God gave our carers these vitamins to give to us. They were entrusted with them. Their roles were created to pass them on.

Yet you cannot give what you are unaware that has been given to you. You see, many of our carers were themselves deficient. They were running on empty stores from their own unhealed years. So depending on the severity of the wounding, we entered our adult lives short. Lacking. Carrying a deficiency in the very things that were created to help us grow, and a deficiency does what deficiencies do.

It stalls growth.

A body starved of a vitamin cannot develop the way it was created to. It is not the body's fault. It simply lacks what it needs to function. The same is true of us. There are identity and emotional parts in many of us that have not grown, not because we did not try, but because we were missing the very thing that growth required.

Quite simply consider that we have been trying to flourish in soil that was never given what it needed.

Ever wondered why life feels so hard at times? I think the above line goes a log way in helping us to see why.

The Artificial Ingredients

When we are deficient and do not understand what it looks like to be restored, we do something very human.

We look for the vitamins outside of us.

The world is more than willing to sell us substitutes. The trouble is that these substitutes are made with artificial ingredients. They are not the real thing. They give a momentary sense of the nutrient we are missing, a brief feeling of being soothed, being filled, being safe. The achievement that finally makes us feel worthy. The relationship that finally makes us feel chosen. The substance, the screen, the praise, the performance that finally quiets the ache.

This, I have come to believe, is what sin ultimately is.

Not first a list of forbidden things, but the attempt to meet a legitimate inner need through an illegitimate means. The need itself is not the problem. The need for unconditional love, for safety, for worth, for belonging, these were placed in us by God. They are healthy and good.

The problem is the artificial ingredient we reach for to meet them. This very transaction is what sin is all about. It leads us away from the inner place within us where the satisfying and freeing answer actually lives, the place that holds everything we need to live a healthy, fulfilling, peaceful, and happy life.

Artificial ingredients do not restore. They only relieve at best, and only for a moment. They never fill the deficiency, so we have to go back. Again, and then again. What began as relief slowly begins to govern us. The thing we reached for to feel better starts making the decisions. It buys up more shares. It often hardens into an addiction we find we cannot free ourselves from, no matter how much we want to.

This is how a minority shareholder loses even the little stake they had left. We hand it over, one substitute at a time, to the very things we thought were helping us.

The restoration we actually need does not come from outside. It comes through the inner work. It comes as the deficiency is named, brought into the light, and slowly, patiently fed with the real thing. This is the work I have given my life to. It is not fast. It is not a substitute. It is the only thing I have ever seen actually restore what seemed to be missing rather than merely mask it.

Why It Begins to Happen For Us

Something changes when the vitamins are restored.

The events of our lives stop reading the same way. The same circumstance that once felt like proof that we were unloved, unsafe, unchosen, begins to look different. Not because the circumstance changed but because the one interpreting it has been fed.

This is the shift from a life that happens to us to a life that happens for us.

It is not positive thinking. It is the natural consequence of restoration. When the deficiency is healed, we are no longer interpreting our lives through the lens of the wound. We begin to see that even the hard things were doing something in us. That the very pain we would never have chosen was, in ways we could not see at the time, forming the person we were created to be.

You cannot reach this interpretation by force. You reach it by healing.

The meaning changes when the heart is fed.

Joseph and the Dark Cellar

I have been with Joseph all month, and I cannot leave him without bringing him here.

We tend to rush to the palace. We love the part where he stands before Pharaoh, where the dreams come true, where the brothers bow. Yet, the palace is not where Joseph was made. He was made in the dark.

Think about how each thing that happened to him pressed on a particular wound. The pit pressed on the wound of betrayal, the unbearable discovery that those who were meant to protect him were the ones who threw him away. Slavery pressed on the wound of powerlessness, the loss of every shred of control over his own life. The prison pressed on the wound of injustice, of doing the right thing and being punished for it anyway, of being forgotten, betrayed, and abandoned once again by the very people he had helped.

Any one of those could have bought a controlling share in Joseph. They could have made him bitter. They could have made him hard. They could have made him into a man who spent the rest of his life proving he could never be hurt again.

Yet something else happened in the dark.

A wine does not become itself in the sunlight. It is laid down in a cellar, in the dark, for years, hidden away from the world it was made to one day gladden. What happens in those dark years determines everything about what is eventually poured out. Left to the unsuitable conditions, the same grapes turn to vinegar. Given the suitable ones, they deepen into something rich enough to be worth the wait.

Joseph's years in the dark were his cellar. The wine he became did not depend on what happened to him. It depended on how he saw it, how he responded to it, and most of all on the inner work that was quietly being done in him as he remained connected to the One that was doing the invisible yet life changing work.

That is the part we cannot skip. The obscurity was not wasted time. It was not God forgetting him. It was the cellar. It was the place where the deficiency was being met, where the shares were being bought back one at a time, where a wounded favourite son was slowly becoming a man who could stand in front of his betrayers and say that what they meant for harm had been worked into good.

Those were not the words of a man who had risen above his pain. They were the words of a man whose pain had finally finished its work in him. 

Grace like that is never a personality.

It is a harvest.

The Question, Once More

So I return to where we began.

Are you the owner of your life, or just a minority shareholder?

If the honest answer is that others are still voting your shares, the wounds, the substitutes, the voice that was installed long ago, then do not despair. That is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the real one. The shares can be bought back. The deficiency can be fed.

The thinking can be once again your very own.

It happens in the cellar. It happens in the inner work. It happens for those willing to go into the dark and let themselves be turned into wine.

In closing, consider where the miracle took place during the wedding feast in Cana.

The water Jesus turned into wine was inside the containers, never outside them. In the same way, what you have been looking for was never out there. It was always within, waiting to be transformed.

If you are willing to enter it, what emerges will not simply be a better version of the wound.

It will be you.

Perhaps for the very first time.

PS See you next Sunday!