I have a cat who is rather quite noisy...It drives some of my family up a wall. But he nearly always gets what he wants. He became much more noisy when the Mama cat of the house passed away and then our doggo patriarch of the house passed away a few months later. He needed a lot more attention that originally he was getting from them. And since they had regular outdoor time schedule he didn't need to ask because he just went with them.

This is not to say you should become the most irritating person on the face of the planet, but you do need to speak up for your needs and wants because no one around you can read your mind or feel your needs.

I want to tell you another story though. My mom has always struggled with insecurity and for that matter so have I. She was excessively abused and as a kid I was bullied non-stop, not just other students but teachers, principles, religious leaders, employers. Until I made a couple of changes. It was a learning curve. I started making the changes in 6th grade and it took many years for me to realize what I was doing to make difference in myself. I became confident, Mom became a little jealous of my confidence and I didn't understand why she couldn't just beef up. 

But then something happened the other day. A bit of back story: there was a arrogant religious leader she knew at a church, who had left his wife and had an affair, and while the church removed him from his position he was still very arrogant. She ran into him at the store the other day and he sneered at her and made a demeaning comment about her to her. I wasn't there and didn't know for a couple of days that this had occurred. When she finally talked to me about it, I finally understood what was happening. See every time someone is mean to her, she hears her parents verbal and physical abuse... and if she had fought back she would be abused all the more. She had the voice beat out of her before she was 5 years old.

So back to the other day: When I heard what happened and how it was still making her feel so unlovable and unacceptable as a human, I got mad. Not mad at her but that this person who doesn't matter had any control over how my mother felt about herself. 

So I told her to yell at the sneer. Yell at the sneer, tell the sneer it is a lie. Shout it. Tell it who you are, Chosen child of the Creator of the Universe. Yell it. Deny the lie any space in your life as loud as you can. Tell the lie to die. So we did. Driving in the car, windows down driving home, yelled at the lie, at the sneer, at the feelings. We shouted the truth of who we were and shouted down the lie. We didn't spend all day, just a few minutes and it changed. I checked with her the next day to see if it was still affecting her and she grinned widely and said it was gone. 

We were talking later and I said to her that Jesus curses lies. When she said where: I realized that when Jesus curses the fig tree it died immediately, but when you dig deeper, the fig tree was blooming but for the state of its bloom, it should have fruit. It was figuratively lying about its status and a developed and life giving plant. He had to command it to do something. And since God does not tolerate untruth, he commanded it to die. 

We need to command life, in our lives. We need to be people of truth, even when we are afraid. But then to stop being afraid we need to become strong in our own right...and sometime that just means get loud. It's amazing how effective it is to get loud. Get broad and loud.