Monsters chasing us

“Chase me, Chase me” said little Ellie as she prepared to run away from me. “Be a monster” she requested.

So I obliged and she ran squealing with excitement in circles around the rooms in the house. This went on for a while and then she said “I be the monster”.

When it was her turn to be the monster, she walked slow, like I had done, with her hands up like claws, and she growled. She had watched me carefully and copied me exactly.

There was no more screaming and she never actually “caught” me, just like I had never actually caught her, because both of us had been taking very slow, Frankenstein type steps.

When she “flipped the role” of being chased and scared, to being the monster herself, she realized that the monster actually had no “power”.

Playing the “role” of monster was not something that changed anything that was real so there was nothing to be scared of…and it was just a game.
The monster was just in her “imagination”.

I find this really helpful for situations in life that seem to have “monsters” chasing us. A monster of poor health can be really scary… or a monster of lack of supply, or a monster of a bad president, or pope, or the monster of any addiction.

But what is “real” is understanding that these things do not have to have any power over our happiness or security any more than Ellie’s imaginary monster had any power over her. It is what we choose to believe that gives us our peace of mind and our freedom.

When I know that God is the only power, I can relax and laugh out loud at the monsters that seems to be chasing me, or chasing society. I can face them and say, “You are not real, you have no power and you are just my imagination, a bad dream”.

In the story of Ichabod Crane, he was so afraid of the story of the headless horseman that he believed what he saw, even though it was “not real”. He was defeated by his wrong belief long before he was defeated in reality.

We actually DO have control over what we choose to believe, and what we give power to in our thinking. We can believe in monsters and run around screaming, or we can laugh at them and know they have no power.

Our reality really is what we believe to be truth. And the truth is, that these monsters do not actually have any more power than we believe them to have. Unlike Ichabod, we do not have to fear for our life, because what is real, is what is good.