When the Narratives We Inherited Limit Us.

I always loved stories about female heroes: Nancy Drew, Wonder Woman, and Isis from the 1970s TV show The Secrets of Isis, defender of the weak and champion of truth and justice. All these characters created a longing in me. I wanted to be like them. At the age of nine, I climbed onto our roof, said Isis’s catchphrase, and jumped, believing I would fly. Spoiler alert: I did not fly. Luckily, our house was not that high, and I got away with a slight limp, which I hid from my mom. I knew I would get a spanking if she found out I had jumped off the roof.

My love for superheroes might have stemmed from feeling so helpless in my real life. Imagining I was Isis was a welcome escape. This might be why I identify so much with Gideon.

A Warrior in a Winepress

When we first meet Gideon in Judges 6, he is threshing wheat in a winepress. Threshing needed open ground and wind, not a pit cut into rock. Gideon was doing the right work in the wrong place, hiding his grain from the Midianite raiders.

Into that hiding place, the angel of the Lord speaks: “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior” (6:12). God called him something he could only have imagined in his wildest dreams. Gideon answered with a question many of us have asked: “Pardon me, my lord, but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?” (6:13). God does not scold him for asking. He sends him: “Go in the strength you have… Am I not sending you?” (6:14).

Like Moses before him, Gideon had his excuses ready: “My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family” (6:15). And like Moses, he received the same promise: “I will be with you” (6:16; Exodus 3:12).

When the Voice Is Our Own

Gideon's words may have reflected his family's actual social standing. But his words also reveal how hard it was for him to imagine a future beyond his present circumstances. These words did not come from the lips of his enemies. Gideon spoke them himself.

His story reminds me of what psychologist E.J.R. David calls internalized oppression: the process by which people absorb the negative stories told about their group until those stories feel like plain fact. No one has to tell you every day that you are less capable. It is enough to grow up surrounded by subtle messages about who leads, who succeeds, and who belongs. After a while, you start saying it for them. People like me don’t do that. Our family has always struggled. Who am I to think I could?

Naming this does not mean pretending disadvantage is imaginary. The question is whether it gets the final word about who you are and what God can do through you.

What is your version of Gideon’s sentence? And where did you first hear it?

A Patient God

Perhaps this is part of why Gideon kept asking for signs. God did not shame his slow trust. He met him in it. And God never gave Gideon superpowers. He cut his army from 32,000 men to 300, so that Israel could not boast that its own strength had saved it (7:2). God was not asking Gideon to discover a hidden superhero inside himself. He was inviting him to see what becomes possible when an ordinary, frightened person trusts an extraordinary God.

Fly or Fall

I am like Gideon. Sometimes the voices trying to put me in my place are so loud that I struggle to hear God’s voice nudging me forward. I struggle to believe that all those narratives become mist in the presence of the Great I Am. My circumstances do not always change overnight. But the inherited narrative no longer has the authority to tell me who I am. God’s presence and God’s call do.

When I jumped off that roof at nine, I was trusting a catchphrase and my own imagination. When God calls, I am trusting the One who already sees who I am becoming. I still cannot fly. But I have learned that I do not need superpowers to follow God’s call. I need to trust the One who promises to be with me.

Your Next Step

This is the work we do together in ENTRUSTED, an eight-week cohort for people who carry a calling and the weight of where they came from. Try our Week 2 exercise.

Write down one belief you inherited about “people like you.” Beside it, write what God says about you instead. Then say it out loud to someone you trust.

Be honest as you do it. Some inherited beliefs are simply false. Others name real limitations that do not decide your worth or your calling. “People from my background cannot lead” might become “God calls people from unexpected places.”

To learn more about ENTRUSTED or join a future cohort, visit https://www.samanthachambo.com/entrusted

You are deeply loved. Go live like it.