So Long Insecurity Read online

  This morning while I was getting ready for church, my cell phone nearly vibrated off the bathroom counter with six incoming texts from a single friend who was having a crisis of heart. I answered her with what little I had to give, even as I grappled with my own issues. I decided that what I needed was a good sermon to keep me from crying off my eyeliner, so I flipped on the television to a terrific local preacher. Lo and behold, the sermon was about what a woman needs from a man.

  Deep sigh.

  Actually, it was a great message if anyone had a mind to do what he was recommending, but knowing human nature and feeling uncharacteristically cynical, I could feel my frustration mounting. The preacher had done his homework. He offered half a dozen Scripture-based PowerPoint slides with state-of-the-art graphics describing what men should do for women. “Women want to be told that they are captivating. That they’re beautiful. Desirable.”

  I won’t deny that. What woman wouldn’t thrive under that kind of steady affirmation?

  But here’s my question: What if no one tells us that? Can we still find a way to be okay? Or what if he says it because he’s supposed to, but to be honest, he’s not feeling it? Are we hopeless? What if a man is not captivated by us? What if he doesn’t think we’re particularly beautiful? Or, understandably, maybe just not every day? Are we only secure on his “on” days? What if he loves us but is not quite as captivated by us as he used to be? What if his computer is full of images of what he finds attractive, and we’re light-years from it? What if we’re seventy-five, and every ounce of desirability is long behind us? Can we still feel adequate in our media-driven society? Or is it only possible if our man has gone blind?

  A guy told me the other day that normal men never get too old to eye women. Wow. Are those of us who are married to these “normal” men supposed to keep trying to compete with what’s out there? Or should we simply tell ourselves that the roving eye of a mate is harmless? I’m not being defensive. I want very much to believe that it is. But if it is, harmless to who?

  Or what if you’re single and there’s not a man on the horizon you want to take home to Daddy? Honestly, is there no validation for our womanhood apart from a man?

  I find it ironic that many of the women who defensively deny needing one single thing from a man have done one of three things: they’ve tried to make themselves into men, they’ve turned to a codependent relationship with a masculine woman, or they’ve done the Sex and the City thing by trying to beat men at their own game.

  Don’t tell me we don’t have man-issues. After all this time in women’s ministry, I won’t believe you. Maybe you are the rare exception, but this I know: if you are a real, live, honest-to-goodness secure woman who is neither obsessed with a man’s affirmation nor nursing a grudge against one, you did not arrive at that place by accident. None of us will.

  I want to get a couple of things out on the table as fast as I can:

  1) Men are certainly not the only source of insecurity for women. We’ll wrestle with other sources on the pages that follow. But we’re starting here because a woman with an unhealthy heart toward men will invariably be unhealthy in all sorts of areas, some of which extend far beyond her sexuality.

  2) I am not a man-basher. Nothing could be further from my intent than to blame men for our problems or infer that we should divorce ourselves from them emotionally in order to survive. God would flatten me like a horsefly if I did that. I don’t think any male in my life would claim that I harbor repressed anger at his gender. (And if he did, I have a mind to hit him square in the middle of his forehead with a slingshot and a bottle of Midol.)

  I’m a big fan of men. I’ve loved some fine ones and married my favorite one. Thirty years in, I’m still nuts about my husband and can’t imagine life without him. Nobody makes me laugh like he does. Nobody makes me think like he does. Nobody has access to my heart like he does. He is worthy of my respect and gets a steady dose of it. So do my terrific sons-in-law, and if anybody on this earth is an object of my unbridled affection, it is my grandson, Jackson. I dearly love my guys and highly esteem so many others.

  Men are not our problem; it’s what we are trying to get from them that messes us up. Nothing is more baffling than our attempt to derive our womanhood from our men. We use guys like mirrors to see if we’re valuable. Beautiful. Desirable. Worthy of notice. Viable. We try to read their expressions and moods in order to determine whether it’s time to act smart and hard to get or play dumb and needy. Worse yet, we try to tap into their inner equestrian by acting like the damsel in distress. When XX meets XY and tries to pry that X away from him so she can have an extra one, she is attempting to mutate both of them.

  I say this with respect and great compassion: we’re attempting to get our security from a gender that doesn’t really have much to spare. Our culture is just as merciless on men as it is on women. Their insecurities take different shapes, but make no mistake: they’ve got them. You know it. I know it.

  Let’s face it. Men want us to get a grip anyway. They don’t like the pressure of being in charge of our sense of value. It’s too much for them. The candid ones will gladly admit it, and for those who don’t, you’ll know it by the flapping of their shirts in the wind as they run for their lives.

  A man is infinitely more attracted to a secure woman than to an emotional wreck who insists he could complete her. As my friend Christy Nockels says, “Men are not drawn to hysterical, needy women.” I’m embarrassed to say that I know this fact from personal experience. No, it’s not my normal approach, but sometimes life offers me such a monumentally irresistible opportunity to act like an idiot that I cave.

  I have had the blessing and curse of being married to a very honest man. Keith is the kind who has prayed for forgiveness for impure thoughts even when I was sitting right there next to him with my head bowed. Needless to say, it didn’t stay bowed. There I was, thinking nothing on earth was safer or more secure than praying with my husband . . . then bam! Honestly, the man would not purposely injure me for the world. And goodness knows, after my first big reaction, he never did this type of prayer-confession again. He is a very loving guy. But he had no idea that one innocent comment (even about guilt, ironically enough) had the capacity to sting my self-esteem, let alone send me into all manner of vain imaginations, depending on my present frame of mind. The worst part of it is, I could still be thinking about what he said a solid week later while he remained oblivious.

  Now that’s a key word that raises an important point. Are we honestly going to insist on drawing our security from people—men or women—who are oblivious to the inordinate amount of weight we give to their estimation of us? Seriously? Maybe others in our lives are not so clueless. Maybe they revel in the power they hold over us. Either way, are we just going to live our lives hurt and offended? The thought is exhausting. The reality is ultimately debilitating.

  In countless ways, Keith has been the best medicine in the world for my terminal case of idealism, as bitter as a dose may taste. I will never forget a brief dialogue we had about ten years ago after I’d suffered a permanent fracture in a friendship. Suddenly his fairly self-sufficient woman (whom he’d married specifically because of that trait) started trying to suck the life out of him and, oddly, thought he’d be glad about it. After considerable deliberation and the careful planning of one committing herself for life, I made a brave and tearful declaration to Keith that went something like this: “I’m going to focus my attention on you. You are my best friend. In many ways, my only friend. I’ve decided that you are the only person on the earth I can really trust.” He looked at me like a scared rabbit and said, “Baby, you can’t trust me!” It was vintage Keith. Though he had never been unfaithful to me nor did he plan to be, it was his spit-it-out-and-prepare-for-carnage way of saying, “You can’t put all your trust in me! I can’t take the pressure! I’ll fail you too!” I was utterly bewildered. Back to square one.

  A beautiful place to be, actually. A place I’m trying to
find. Again. Maybe the person I’m ticked at is me. Maybe I’m furious at myself for needing any part of this journey for my own sake. How could I need anything else in this world beyond what I already have? Lord, have mercy. What more could a woman want? As a matter of fact, I’d like to tell you exactly what more this woman could want—and not just for herself. I want some soul-deep security drawn from a source that never runs dry and never disparages us for requiring it. We need a place we can go when, as much as we loathe it, we are needy and hysterical. I don’t know about you, but I need someone who will love me when I hate myself. And yes, someone who will love me again and again until I kiss this terrestrial sod good-bye.

  Life is too hard and the world too mean for many of us to grasp a lofty sense of acceptance, approval, and affirmation early on and keep hold of it the rest of our lives . . . come what may. Circumstances abruptly change, and setbacks happen. Relationships unexpectedly end. Or, just as cataclysmically, begin. Schools change. Friends change. Jobs change. Offenses happen. Betrayals happen. Tragedies happen. Engagements end. Marriages begin. Kids come. Kids go. Health wanes. Seasons change. An old situation creeping up in a new season of our life can be more complicated than ever. We can think we’ve murdered that monster once and for all, and then it rises from the dead and it has grown another head.

  As if the battle isn’t hard enough, we sabotage ourselves, submerging ourselves with self-condemnation like a submarine filling with water. How often do we think to ourselves, I should be handling this better? So is it okay to ask why we’re not? Like, what’s at the root of an ugly knee-jerk reaction?

  God did not create static beings when He breathed a soul into Adam. Dynamic creatures that we are, we are ever changing and ever spiraling up—or down. Please don’t misunderstand. God forbid that we live life in a vicious cycle of gaining ground and losing it. I’ve learned some lessons that have lasted decades, and I hope to heaven I don’t ever have to relearn them. However, I’ve never arrived at a place where injury or uncertainty no longer issues an invitation to some pretty serious self-doubt even when I make the tough decision not to bite the bait. I still get thrown for a loop more easily than I would like and find myself in a temporary but painful setback of insecurity—one that affects me too chronically to deny that something is broken somewhere. Often when a situation warrants a minor case of injured feelings, I tend to respond with a classic case of devastation. “I know better than this,” I chide. “I can’t believe I’ve fallen for this again. My head knows good and well that this doesn’t define me. Why can’t I get that message to my heart?”

  Listen carefully: the enemy of our souls has more to gain by our setbacks than by our succumbing to an initial assault. The former is infinitely more demoralizing. Far more liable to make us feel hopeless and tempt us to quit. We can rationalize—even truthfully—that an initial assault caught us by surprise. Setbacks, on the other hand, just make us feel weak and stupid: I should have conquered this by now. I happened on a question not long ago that perfectly expresses this mentality: How many times must I prove myself an idiot?

  I hate that I can still be so easily shaken, and somehow I convince myself that if I could just develop a healthy enough psyche, life couldn’t touch me. I’d be completely immovable. Steady Eddie. A rock. One thing keeps nagging at me, though. A man with an incomparable heart for God once confessed, “When I felt secure, I said, ‘I will never be shaken.’ O LORD, when you favored me, you made my mountain stand firm; but when you hid your face, I was dismayed” (Psalm 30:6-7).

  Just when I’m feeling all secure, like I’m God’s best friend, an earthquake splits that lofty mountain right down the middle. And boy, am I dismayed. I have a feeling we can never get so secure in ourselves that we cannot be moved. Can a rock ever move forward?

  Is the goal of the believing life to get to a place where we simply hold steady till we die? Maybe that’s part of my problem. Maybe I just get bored easily. I’m forever wanting to go someplace with God. I forget that in order to really want to go, something has to happen to make me want to leave where I am. Maybe we’re all just sick to death of taking three steps forward and two steps back. Call me a math wizard, but isn’t that still one step forward? Isn’t that still some pretty big progress as we run against the hurricane winds of a godless culture? And if we don’t lose that ground, aren’t we on our way somewhere new? Willing to take three more steps—even if we lose two?

  Maybe this process is just for me. I’ve never written a single book out of expertise. I usually write to discover something I myself am yearning for. Even desperate for. I have given myself over to a lot of things along the way, but God help me, somebody tell me to retire when I start writing books just to talk about myself. That kind of self-importance makes me want to hang my head over a toilet. God has sustained this women’s ministry with its one simple approach: I’m a common woman sharing common problems seeking common solutions on a journey with an uncommon Savior. If something hurts me, I conclude it probably hurts somebody else too. If something confuses me, I figure it probably confuses somebody else. If something helps me, I hope against hope that it might help somebody else. After all, “no trial has overtaken [us] that is not faced by others. And God is faithful” (1 Corinthians 10:13, NET).

  To be honest, I don’t know whether you and I are at a common place right now. I just have a hunch. See if this sounds like something that could erupt from your own pen: I’m sick to death of insecurity. It’s been a terrible companion. A very bad friend. It promised to always think of me first and meticulously look out for my best interests. It vowed to stay focused on me and help me not get hurt or forgotten. Instead, insecurity invaded every part of my life, betrayed me, and sold me out more times than I can count. It’s time I got healthy enough emotionally to choose my lifelong companions better. This one needs to get dumped.

  By the grace and power of God, I’ve had the exhilarating joy of winning many battles, some of them against no small foes. I’ve experienced dramatic victory over sexual sin, addiction, unhealthy relationships, and other equally fierce opponents. But I have not won this particular battle against the stronghold of insecurity. Yet. God help me, I’m going to. This one’s too sinister and deeply woven into the fabric of my female soul to deal with amid a bagful of other strongholds. Thank God, a time comes in a willing life when you’re ready to face a Goliath-sized foe all by itself and fight it to the stinking death.

  You hold in your hands one woman’s quest for real, lasting, soul-changing security. I’d be honored if you care to join me.

  Chapter 2

  Insecure Enough to Matter

  We all have insecurities. They piggyback on the vulnerability inherent in our humanity. The question is whether or not our insecurities are substantial enough to hurt, limit, or even distract us from profound effectiveness or fulfillment of purpose. Are they cheating us of the powerful and abundant life Jesus flagrantly promised? Do they nip at our heels all the way from the driveway to the workplace? Scripture claims that believers in Christ are enormously gifted people. Are our insecurities snuffing the Spirit until our gifts, for all practical purposes, are largely unproductive or, at the very least, tentative? Maybe you can answer each of those questions with an honest no. The only reason I’m bothering to write a book instead of leading a small group, however, is because I believe if you can, you’d be in the vast minority.

  I’m convinced that many women—if not most—have enough insecurity to hinder them. I recently surveyed more than nine hundred women and found that 78 percent admitted to having feelings of insecurity at or above a level that bothers them.1 That qualifies as a major cry for healing. Of the total number of respondents, 43 percent described their issues with insecurity as anywhere from “pretty big” to “huge.” If those nine hundred women are remotely reflective of the rest of us, we need to own up to a serious problem and seek serious solutions from a Creator who wonderfully crafted us.

  Before we inch any further, let’s start sha
ping some working definitions of insecurity so we can figure out if ours warrants attention and healing. Later in our journey, we’ll also discuss various experiences that can feed those insecurities. Rest assured until then that there are often plausible explanations for why one person’s insecurities exceed another’s.

  I am well enough acquainted with the issue to know that as we start defining and describing this malady, those of you with fairly chronic cases are going to begin to feel insecure even about your insecurities. (It takes one to know one.) Try not to go there. There was a time when I would have been tempted to put away a book that magnified my vulnerabilities, but these days I’d rather press through the discomfort of staring at my weaknesses than live in denial and bondage. The enemy of your soul has a tremendous amount to gain if you don’t deal with your insecurities. Don’t let him have that kind of victory. Let’s just stay honest and courageous, and trust that help is on the way.

  Okay, let’s start by looking at one specialist’s definition of insecurity:

  Insecurity refers to a profound sense of self-doubt—a deep feeling of uncertainty about our basic worth and our place in the world. Insecurity is associated with chronic self-consciousness, along with a chronic lack of confidence in ourselves and anxiety about our relationships. The insecure man or woman lives in constant fear of rejection and a deep uncertainty about whether his or her own feelings and desires are legitimate.2