Russ Gerber, CSB

I remember hearing an interview on the radio many years ago with Shirley Temple Black. She wanted to talk about her work as the then U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. But the interviewer kept asking her questions about her roles as a child star. While that’s not surprising, Black persistently steered the conversation back to her current work.

Finally, the interviewer asked why she seemed reluctant to say much about her landmark years in film. She answered politely but firmly that it simply wasn’t her. She explained that she was an ambassador and as such had a totally different purpose for her life and very different responsibilities to fulfill. As wonderful as those years in film were, she said repeatedly, “That isn’t me!”

Not a small point. We don’t realize how it undercuts our ability to develop as individuals if we’re not willing to leave behind old self-concepts for the shaping of totally new ones.

If it repeatedly occurs to us that there has to be a different and better way to live our life, be prepared to find that it’s more than built-up frustration with current circumstances that we’re butting heads with. It could be we’re being prodded by an inner-felt need to change, the urge to discover something new about ourselves and the universe of ideas in which we exist. Think of it as a golden opportunity for development.

What can break through entrenched, old self-perceptions, and lead to new feelings of hope and vitality and direction, is the spiritual element we hadn’t been paying much attention to but that in fact is with us all along. It could be we’re feeling an intuitive sense to set our sights much higher.

The transformation that gradually takes place within us as we’re open to higher concepts of ourselves begins to dispel feelings of dullness and empowers resolve. There’s a growing expectation of improvement and purpose. We’re attuned to seeing a new direction emerge, a new next step in our career, expanded opportunities we hadn’t seen, meeting people we should get to know, and who should get to know us. There’s an awakening to the fact that we’re capable of accomplishing a whole lot more, and of recognizing that which is of lasting value in life.

I was always struck by the invitation Jesus made to those ordinary fishermen who became his students. They were invited to leave the old for the new. “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men,” he said. He wasn’t asking them to abandon their career, but rather to expand it. It was about growth. Spiritual growth.

Following a similar line of thinking to leave the old human concept of ourselves for the new, spiritual idea, we’re prompted to leave behind be the frustrated, unhappy person we’ve become so familiar with. To begin the change, maybe we need to take a page from Shirley Temple Black’s playbook and instead affirm, “That’s not me!”

If you’ve been longing to feel good again consider what it means to raise your sights and expand your self-concept. This isn’t about something we don’t have that needs to be acquired. It’s something we do have that is within us, a spiritual idea compelling us to discover how much better, infinitely better, we truly are because of it.