Please Do Not Change My Colors

**This is a podcast that has been adapted for the blog. Enjoy!

Hey sisters,

I hope that at this moment you can stop and take a breath with me. I hope that you came to this podcast (or blog) because you know that when you press play, you're going to have an opportunity to enter into a matrix that is all for you and all your own. So, A quick moment to take a breath. Right here in this moment.

I want to talk to you briefly about a little epiphany and an aha moment, a very beautiful, organic aha moment that I had, but it was profound. It was like a spiritual reminder, and it came from a spreadsheet of mine.

So I was like, yep, this is a teachable moment. It is a discussion. It is a gentle reminder to my sisters who listen to these episodes. So I was working on a spreadsheet, you know, just a technical, functional document. You know how spreadsheets are, and some of us love them, like them, do whatever with them, but sometimes spreadsheets have to be a part of our lives. And I came across a note that I had made for myself. And it simply said, please don't change my colors. And it was in bold. I made that note for a reason. I am going to pull on the right brain of me today, the creative, artsy brain of me today, and I'm going to talk to you in a caring way but with a little bit of creativity in my languaging. I want to make my language colorful today because I want you to journey with me.

I want you to go on a journey for yourself as I talk with you about my epiphany. Please do not change my colors. Now, in a world of data, initially, it was just a reminder to keep my formatting consistent. But as I sat there, those words started vibrating with me in a different kind of frequency. It tapped into my spirit; my spirit was notified, and my eyes widened a little bit. My spiritual ears kind of perked open to the moment. And today is already a fasting day for me, so I think maybe I am also very heightened because of that, but it felt like a prayer. It felt like a boundary. And it felt like a declaration of the soul, of my soul. So I want to talk to you about your colors. I want you to think about the ones God paints, the colors that God painted into your spirit before you even took your 1st breath. I want you to think about the journey that you've been on, of learning how to keep them vibrant. In a world that wants you to paint in a gray scale. In a world that constantly wants to rob you of your vibrancy and of your colors and of your beauty. Do with that as you will, apply it where it needs to be. I want you to think about it as it relates to your divinely designed self, who you are right now in your life, the age you are, the things that life is requiring of you, the things that you may be pursuing, or the pivots and changes that you may be pondering, considering, or actively executing right now. Because we spend so much of our lives trying to find ourselves, especially in those early decades of life. Now, sisters 40+, we should be into the meat of this discovery, or coming out of the other end of that discovery. And the discovery never really shifts, but what we learn within discovery definitely does. And based on what you learn, um, it's not always about creating a new version of yourself. We talk about redirecting, redesigning life, or editing life. Sometimes it's not about a new version of you. It's about uncovering the original version.

I think we are born with God's original design for ourselves, but as we journey in this earthly portal, a lot influences it. It may veer in a different direction. It may detour life, and life decisions and circumstances can take you on a different path. And so we have to uncover our original design. And as women, oftentimes, we're taught to be chameleons in every space that we are in, we talk about shifting. We talk about code switching. We talk about being fit for every room that we walk into. We are thinking about being a suitable partner and how we are able to identify and coexist with our partners. We are looking at how we need to meet a job description, keep the peace in our families and our sister circles. But there is a fundamental palette that God gave you. Do you know what that palette is? I'm gonna give you a few. Your fundamental palate is your temperament, your intuition, which comes from your spirit, and your specific way of loving yourself. I'm calling it a holy stubbornness, your soft heart. Those things about you that are not flaws and they do not need to be sanded down. They are your primary colors. Now, I'm not talking about experiences, negative experiences, unfortunate experiences that calloused you. I'm talking about who you innately, organically are as a person. I'm talking about making sure that you know who you are after you have stripped all of your roles. After you’ve taken all of your hats off.

And if you haven't thought about who you are, fundamentally, I want this episode to encourage you to dive into that. We all need to know who we are outside of our roles, outside of the things that we do. I have stripped it down to this:

I am a woman.

I am a black woman.

I am a child of God.

I am the daughter of Larry and Dorothy Leonard.

Within that one sentence of identification, that ID of mine, it is loaded with a lot. That ID can take me many places in my lifetime. And it can apply several divinely appointed assignments in my lifetime. That ID is powerful enough to align me with the work, the cause, and the calling that God has placed me on the earth to fulfill. Does that make sense to you? In the eyes of the creator, your yellow is your joy, and it's needed. I'm giving you some color, giving you a color palette consideration here. So it's just going to be a little figurative. Your deep blue? Sister, that's your depth and your empathy. And guess what? It too is sacred, that soft heart.

When we say, “Lord, show me who I am?” we're asking him, “Show me the colors that you used when you created me, when you knit me together, when you formed me in my mother's womb. I want to know who I am in you. And I want to realize that my genetics were not an accident.” I have said this many times, especially my social justice work. We don't have a choice as to how we get here, but we are here, and when we come to this planet, when we come to earth, when we are born through our mother's canal, we come with a purpose; an identity. You are a deliberate choice. Alright? I want to go back to my note, my note that said, please don't change my colors because in a shared spreadsheet, anyone who has access to that spreadsheet can do what? Click a button, do what? Change those colors. Mm-hmm. So what happens when your vibrant cells, I’m talking about cells on a spreadsheet, are muted? Or changed. Let me ask you this way. When life poses the same question, when people try to edit you, they call you too passionate, or you're too much. They say, you're too loud, you're too this, you're too quiet. You're too docile. You're too aggressive. You're too unlearned. You're not experienced yet. You're overqualified. They try to convince you that to be successful or to be a good woman, acceptable woman, qualifiable woman, a good candidate of this, a good woman of faith, that you need to tone down your brilliance or you don't need to, um, you don't need to overshadow somebody else's light or you need to get more education, you need to get more training. All of those things, but resilience isn't just about bouncing back from hard times, y'all. I've been talking about rest and resilience and surrender, and what all of that means.

Check that out in the podcast before this one. Listen, resilience is the quiet strength to say you can have my time, you can have my labor, and you can have my support, but you cannot change my colors. I want you to think about a time recently when you felt yourself fading to fit in, to be accepted, to fit the criteria. Maybe you didn't speak your truth because you didn't want to be difficult. Some of us have heard that. Maybe it was another sophisticated word choice, but it was saying the same thing. Maybe you suppressed your natural leadership to avoid being bossy, too opinionated, or arrogant. Look, when we allow other people to change our colors, we lose exactly who we are. We lose our joy. You lose a little bit of your yellow, you lose a little bit of your blue. You lose a little bit of your green, and then we start becoming these copies of somebody else's expectations. It’s a copy that doesn't allow us to live in the fullness of the peace, the shalom that was given to us, and the identity that was created for us. So this is not going to be a long episode. I want to give you some wisdom about your journey. I’m getting ready to approach 5 decades of life. I feel like I'm just now beginning, but I'm gonna share with you some things that I have gleaned from life, from faith, from wisdom, and from people around me. (Let me also remind you that people can teach you lessons, and they do not have to be like you.)

As I've journeyed through my own womanhood, I realize that the most powerful thing I can be is distinct. That is, knowing what fundamental things about me don't need to change. And knowing that, is my maturity. That's my spiritual maturity. That is my growth. That is my groundedness in knowing who I am. This knowing spills over into my relationships, my friendships, my marriage, my ministry work, my social services, my wellness work, the way that I interact with people, what people feed from me and feel from me, and the fruit that I produce is from knowing that I am meant to be distinct. That is a fundamental part of me that is not to be altered. Growth is good. We want fruit.

Number one, if you feel like you've lost your true hue, your vibrancy, your color, or right now it's being threatened by someone, some system, some altercation, some new season of life that maybe you are trying to figure out, or it just feels threatening. It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel like this is something that you need to be doing. I want you to reclaim your palette. I want you to audit your life. I use the word audit quite often. Who's holding your edit? Who's in charge of your edit button? Who's holding your edit tool to your spirit, to your life, to your well-being? Hmm? I want you to think about how your life is being audited right now. When we think about the word audit, what does that actually mean? Audit is a way of examining. Examining financial records, your operation, your compliance system, your accuracy, your standards. So you have to do that for your life. You audit the standards of your life. You assess the risks. You assess your assets. You assess your structure. And you hold that tool, that cursor, to do that. There are times when we need to edit. But you are the editor. You get what I'm saying?

Second thing I want you to do, I want you to make sure that you are setting your boundaries. It's okay to be too much for people who aren't enough for you. It is okay for you to say that you are pulling more from me than you are investing in me. It is okay for you to say, I need to decline. I need to minimize some of the time that I'm spending with you because it's gonna leave me spent. And my currency, my value, is far too precious for me to live spent. I want you to trust the artist, the creator. I want you to trust that God don't make no mistakes with you and about you. He gave you a specific personality. He gave you a specific look. He gave you a specific vision, and he needs you exactly the way you are to reach the people and the places that you are designed to reach. So before you go back into your day, I'm nearing the close of this. I want you to leave.

I want to leave you with this little food for thought. I want you to chew on it. Meditate on it. I want you to digest it. I want you to know what it's supposed to feel like once you digest it in the pit of your soul. I want it to agree with you. You are a masterpiece, and oftentimes, yes, a masterpiece in progress, but your colors are already set. They're royal, they're defined, they're yours. So don't change your colors. Please, don't change your colors. Walk in the confidence of the woman who you know you are, and more importantly, Whose you are.

Live, Age, Be Well & Whole