Last week I wrote two vulnerable posts on ‘being an impostor’. The first looked back at some words spoken into my childhood and how they were branded on my heart and soul – seemingly impossible to erase. The second looked at the healing that came through honesty and erasing the branding of those words. Today I’m talking about re-branding and believing a new script.
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A couple of years ago, an article in Business Insider looked at 10 companies that successfully rebranded. Among those companies cited in the article were Burberry, J.Crew, Old Spice, and even home to what for many are familiar yellow arches – McDonalds.
McDonalds — the company that gave us transfat and that in abundance, now gives us little bags of sliced granny smith apples and salads. Old Spice cologne, previously for Old Men, gives us a handsome man on a black stallion. And Burberry, created for the man who goes fishing, has made plaid chic.
So why did they rebrand? A company rebrands in order to become more effective, to develop a new identitiy in the minds of consumers, to communicate a new message. It is hard work to rebrand a company and often takes a radical change in thinking, change in the way they do business.
It’s remarkable what successful rebranding can do, indeed has done.
And so it is with me. To rebrand takes a radical change in thinking: in the way I live, in the message I believe, in the message I communicate.
If mere humans with creative minds and a lot of money can rebrand, how much more so can the God who delights in restoring and rebranding? A God who can work a radical change in his people, restoring his image for his glory.
Those childhood wounds that brand us, that tell us lies about who we are and what we’ll become, are not strong when they come up against the Image of the God who made us. The impostor, the fake I believed myself to be was not a true brand, it told only a tiny part of the story. The real story came from before I was born, when I was knit in the womb. The real story came when on the day I was born, God saw what he had made and he called it ‘Good’. The real story is not written in the things people say to us, the names we are called, or the hurts we’ve sustained; the real story is written in the work of God and his story of redemption and restoration; his story in our lives, and our story as it fits in with the Great Story.
So this impostor stuff? It may emerge now and then, filled with ugly and insecure, but it will never again define me, never again hold me hostage to memories and believing that is who I am, that is what I am.
I’ve been rebranded and know I bear the stamp of the image of God, as powerful and secure an image as has ever been made.