So Long Insecurity Page 14

  Please do not let me confuse healing with betrayal. Help me to see any place in my life where I’m hanging on to my grief or anger in an attempt to hang on to what I’ve lost. Grant me the gift of healthy grief that does not fight the pain or the process of healing. Lord, please help me to see where I have suffered a substantial loss that I’ve never regarded. Where I lost innocence, grant me integrity. Where I lost a relationship, grant me true intimacy. Where I lost a home, grant me an internal, unshakable sense of belonging. Where I’ve held someone responsible for my loss, grant me the ability to forgive. Don’t stop until You’ve made a miracle of me.

  Lord, help me to learn how to hang on tight to You when my life is rocked by dramatic change. Empower me to trust You and not to panic or fight for control. Help me to stop confusing a change in my circumstances with a change in my security status. You are my security, O God. You are the one sure thing. When everything around me shakes, You are unshakable. Nothing has the propensity to reveal false gods to me like a sudden change in my circumstances. Help me to see them and surrender them instantaneously. Use change to provoke what needs changing in me, Lord, and to increase my appreciation of the only One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

  Lord, I now ask You to single out everything You entrusted to me as part of my physical and psychological makeup: personal limitations, my appearance, and my God-given disposition. You knew what You were doing when You formed me in my mother’s womb. Nothing is without purpose. Nothing has thrown off the plan. Every gift, challenge, and obstacle is meant to shape the specific destiny You ordained for me before time began. Your intent is to make a wonder out of me and show what You can do through me. You mean to increase the praise that comes to You because of my life. You want to defy the odds in order to make Yourself conspicuous in me. Please deliver me from self-pity and a life of excuses and rationalizations. And Lord, where I’ve otherwise lapsed into self-adoration and self-centeredness instead, help me to recognize my narcissism and no longer tolerate it. Of all things, please don’t let it be said that I loved myself too much to fully love anybody else. Please don’t let me gain the world but lose my soul.

  Father, help me to see where I am overly sensitive and where I put too much pressure on relationships. Help me to see where I insist on making a situation all about me. I really want to change. Help me to quit saying, “This is the way I am,” and remind me that I am capable of tremendous transformation with You. Deliver me from insecurity in my relationships. Help me to cease being so easily wounded, but at the same time, keep me from growing hardened. Help me to resign my position as a game player and manipulator without resigning myself to a life of misuse. Help me to realize that it’s pointless to demand that others love me more or love me better. Real affection cannot be coerced. I cannot put a human in charge of my security without setting him or her up for certain failure. Help me to stop using a person as my mirror and start seeing myself as You alone see me.

  Lord, even in the midst of all these requests, I thank You with my whole heart for working so diligently in my life. Yes, there have been people who have hurt me and have done a very poor job of taking Your place, but there have also been people who have shown me glimpses of You. Not perfect people, but genuine people. In particular, I thank You for . . .

  ___________________________

  ___________________________

  ___________________________

  I thank You for all You have done to get me to this place and for the plan You have ahead for me. I come now, Lord, to the apex of my petition: please restore to my soul all that insecurity has stolen from me. Overturn every single thing the enemy meant for evil into something good. Perform a miracle on me, Lord. Cover me with Your trustworthy hand. Clothe me with strength and dignity. Transform what drives me. Quell what triggers me. Make me a courageous woman in this harrowing culture. One who refuses to be reduced and defined by the media. Help me to make conscious decisions about whether or not the cost of what they’re selling is worth buying. Give me the discernment to call a lie a lie.

  Make me the kind of woman a little girl could follow to dignity and security. I actively and deliberately receive—and vow to keep receiving—everything that I have requested in Your will this day. Let this statement reverberate into every corner of my life and invade the bone marrow of my belief system: Today on ___________________________ [date], I receive my dignity back. No one and nothing can take it from me because You are the One who gave it. Help me to recognize that I’ve lost my dignity only because I have surrendered it. Empower me to claim it back and hang on to it with all my might. Because of Your mercy, Lord, I am no fool. Only a wise woman shifts her trust to You.

  In Jesus’ saving and delivering name,

  Amen.

  Chapter 10

  Neither Gods nor Devils

  We’re now barreling forward into my favorite part of our journey toward wholeness. We’re transitioning from the problem to the real, live, doable solutions. Before we can move toward healing, we first need to talk about men, their insecurities, and the role they play in ours. It may seem like we’re backtracking a bit, but if you will persevere with me, I promise you will see where we are going.

  I thought of you recently as I sat in the waiting room of a prominent surgeon’s office. My right knee keeps testifying to all the trouble it’s seen. Truth be told, it’s been through a lot. I was an eighties aerobics queen at the summit of high impact, and for years I held the time record at my gym on the StairMaster. I’ve jogged a thousand miles along the way and hiked a hundred more. I have done some hard living on that knee and the one next to it. A hyperactive writer is left to a life of extremes. I’m either sitting dead still or trying to work up a sweat—in jogging shoes or spiked heels.

  When I started getting concerned that my kneecap was about to rebel, my intention was to tend to it at a suburban hospital. My buddies would hear nothing of it. In their persuasive estimation, I needed to head to Houston’s renowned medical center and see the best orthopedic surgeon in town, who incidentally was also a friend of ours. He’s worth it, but his office is at least twenty miles from my part of the city and right off the most congested freeway in the entire area. I’d rather have taken a beating than go to all that extra trouble for one small body part. But once I arrived and saw the Starbucks on the first floor of the high-rise, I rested in God’s perfect will. I pushed the elevator button for the sixteenth floor, made a split-second ascent, and stepped through the doors to a hopping state-of-the-art sports medicine facility. I hear that many of Houston’s professional athletes seek medical treatment here, but the best I could tell, it was mostly me and the University of Houston football team. I felt a bit awkward, but perhaps it appeared that I was their trainer. Okay, one of their mothers.

  Finally a nurse called me back to an examining room and told me they would need to take X-rays first. “Put these on,” she said and kindly pitched me a one-size-fits-all pair of bright blue paper shorts with an elastic band, turned on her heels, and shut the door. At least a minute passed before I made so much as a twitch. Do I have to? I mean, is it a rule that you can’t get an X-ray without putting these on? Why can’t I just roll up my jeans? It’s just one knee, for crying out loud. After a short, slightly annoyed sigh, I dropped my cute brown purse on the floor, picked up the shorts, and commenced getting changed. There, all by myself in the examining room, I got so tickled I could barely balance enough to get my second foot through a leg of the shorts, and trust me when I tell you it was not for lack of room. That was the moment I knew the rumors were true. The Houston Rockets’ seven-foot-six-inch shooting star, Yao Ming, had undoubtedly been treated in this office, and I’ll tell you something else: these were clearly his shorts.

  Every now and then something so discomfiting happens to you that it doesn’t matter if no one else sees it. Civilized creatures that we are, we are fully capable of being embarrassed for our own pitiful selves. In moments like these, I have half a mind to wonder if
a hidden camera is on me or if my practical-joker friends are thinking they’re hilarious again. As I sat on the edge of the examining table waiting for the nurse, I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs, trying to decide which looked less absurd. About the time I decided to go with crossing them and, out of sheer boredom, had begun to swing my top leg in and out like a high-kicker in a chair, she breezed through the door.

  “Come this way, Mrs. Moore. Oh, and you’ll want to put your shoes back on.” No, really, I won’t. I’ll put them back on, but make no mistake, I won’t want to. Yao Ming would not be caught dead wearing heels with these shorts. God must love me too much to let me off the hook from a good humbling, so as you might guess, the X-ray room was occupied and, rather than return me to my room, the nurse seated me squarely in the waiting area . . . with people in it. People, incidentally, who were wearing their real clothes and not paper shorts and high heels. I was so glad I had shaved my legs, but by sheer devotion to the Hippocratic oath, someone should have rushed me by ambulance to a tanning bed.

  Then again, maybe people weren’t staring at me. Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe a television I could neither see nor hear was an inch over my head, and everyone in the room was fixated on it. First I broke out in a sweat. Then I did what my family tends to do at inappropriate times. I got tickled. The snorting kind of tickled. Then I slipped out my cell phone and tried as inconspicuously as possible to hold it out in front of me and take a picture of myself from the waist down. I knew a few folks who would appreciate receiving it, and they did not disappoint.

  I don’t care what anyone says or what any store sells, men and women don’t wear the same shorts. Not well, anyway, and whoever is responsible for elastic waistbands on paper pants should turn himself in to the authorities. Men and women are equally wonderful, equally eye catching, and equally competent, but in all our equality of value, we are not the same. We both have insecurities, but they often don’t surface the same way. Take, for instance, a story I recently heard about Abraham Lincoln. A fellow lawyer, Edwin M. Stanton, called him “a gawky, long-armed ape,” yet upon becoming president, Lincoln turned around and made Stanton his secretary of war. I’d like to propose to you that Lincoln’s wife never would have done that. She more likely would have spent her life savings on an arm reduction and a thorough waxing, then held the man, pardon the pun, at arm’s length for the rest of her fitful life. Believe you me, Stanton wouldn’t have known the meaning of the word war until he ran into that woman in a dark alley.

  Women aren’t nearly as likely as men to respect someone who insulted them. And yet we brace ourselves constantly for the offense. Knowing I was compiling research on the differences between women’s and men’s insecurities, one woman offered a near-perfect illustration from the hallowed halls of middle school. In order to keep the story in its cultural context, permit me to leave the wording exactly as she wrote it:

  After fifteen years of coaching basketball, for the first time my husband is coaching a team of junior high girls. He has coached a lot of boys’ teams and a few young coed teams, but this is our first experience with the “group mind” of teenage girls. At practice yesterday, he called them together as a group to tell them two things. In their nervousness, the girls tried to guess what he was going to tell them. One girl guessed, “We’re going to lose!” Another chimed in, “You’re going to tell us we suck.”

  My husband was baffled. None of the other teams he had ever coached had suffered from such blatant insecurity. He looked at me and laughed. “This is the difference in coaching girls, and I see how you got started!” (I suffer from the insecurity pit.) By the way, the two things he told the girls were that (1) it was okay to be aggressive and (2) they should not be afraid to shoot more.

  But don’t think for one moment that guys don’t have insecurities. I owe a great debt of gratitude to 150 of them who were willing to lend me a little insight through a short survey I posted on my blog. The group was comprised of men—married and single—ranging in age from twenty to seventy. Though I did not request locations, you can almost certainly picture them coming from all over the United States. Because the goal for that particular survey was to gain cultural rather than spiritual insights, I didn’t require that people post their religious affiliation or ages, and all comments were posted anonymously. Knowing how few words the average man speaks a day compared to the average woman, I thought I’d get the best responses if I kept the number of questions short and sweet:

  1. What are your primary areas of insecurity, and how do they tend to act on you? (In other words, how do you normally act when you’re feeling insecure?)

  2. What is the most common way you notice insecurity in women?

  Some of the answers to the second question will come up in later chapters. For now, let’s sit tight on the first one. A handful of the guys claimed not to have any insecurity at all, and three or four of them built pretty convincing cases. One flatly stated, “I am not insecure . . . I just don’t understand what there is to be insecure about.” Personally, I don’t think he’s getting out of the house enough, but on the other hand, he honestly may not struggle with a single insecurity nor comprehend why anybody else would. Out of respect, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

  Most of the men claimed to be in the same general boat we are in, even if their side of the ship is painted a different shade. They were refreshingly open with fears and self-doubts, even in short form, and ultimately gave women a pretty fair shake. You might be relieved to know that many areas of insecurity leap the gender gap and keep company on both continents. A number of the men in the survey grapple with their self-worth and self-image just like many of us do. They also described social and sexual awkwardness, as well as ongoing fears of rejection and scars from past relationships. You can hear pain and uncertainty in their words much like you hear in ours. Listen for yourself as you thumb through their comments:

  I want most to be loved even if I am wrong or fail. I fear unforgiveness. So I forgive, knowing at least God will forgive me then. I want only a faithful love. I fear being ignored, abandoned, and abused. So I pay attention to those who are present to love, even in silence. I want a last love, never a first. I fear it is too late for me. So I love those put before me today and look for tomorrow.

  I’m very insecure about whether or not my wife is happy. This isn’t because of anything she does; I just get more and more convinced every day that she could do so much better than me. She deserves more.

  I’m most insecure about whether others will love me back if I don’t love them well. Deep down, I wonder who will love me back if I don’t do more for them than they do for me.

  Listen to the throb of fear in this one:

  I am thirty-six, and my most common area of insecurity is being worried that my wife is cheating on me. I have actually had this happen a couple of times, and so when I don’t hear from my wife when I expect to or sometimes even if she is just out, my mind starts to “What if?” Then I work out how I will react when she finally tells me or I find out for sure. This is crazy, as I trust my wife and have no reason to doubt her—just past baggage rearing its head.

  Countless women know exactly what he’s talking about. Half the time we don’t know if we’re discerning something real or making something up. Our similarities go far beyond matters of the heart. Don’t think for a second that guys don’t care about how they look. Plenty of them fret over their weight, about being out of shape, and about whether or not their mates or members of the opposite sex will find them desirable. They may be less obvious about their appearance insecurities, but those fears are present and accounted for. We’ll let the men speak for themselves:

  The biggest area [of my insecurity] would be my over-forty body. I want to look good for my wife and to others, but I got behind on the ole physical fitness routine. . . . For my appearance I started a new diet and workout routine and try clothes that look better.

  Are you quick to assume it’s just an age thing wit
h men? Think again.

  I am twenty-seven years old, and I am most insecure about my height and weight (or at least lack of the physical tone I once had).

  Sound familiar? This one might too.

  I’m insecure about my weight. I shy away from doing things that other people do, like water sports.

  We feel your pain, sir. At one time or another every woman, no matter how young and darling, has glanced at her bloated self in the mirror and thought she’d rather take a sharp stick in the eye than put on her two-piece and go skiing. Then again, men don’t just worry about being overweight. They also worry about being underweight:

  I am not generally insecure. I have a wife who often gives me strong affirmations, and I have a secure job despite the economy. We have an amazing marriage that we continue to work on, and we are on the same page on most issues. I’m most insecure about my physical appearance. I am thinner than most and genetically predisposed to stay that way. I tend to wear layers and like that we live in a northern area that has long winters requiring bulkier clothes.

  Granted, few women in our culture would scribble excessive thinness in their top-ten list of insecurities, but none would argue that physical appearance is not a huge factor in the insecurity struggle. Here are a couple more to make sure we’ve hammered down the point. Interestingly, both of them come from thirty-four-year-old husbands.

  I don’t think guys are much different than girls these days. My insecurities are that my wife won’t always love me—or find me attractive—that she’ll leave me someday. (Though there’s zero evidence that that would be the case. We have a great relationship. It’s an internal struggle for me.) I wish I was a better lover.