So Long Insecurity Page 21

  At the same time, I vividly remember being able to get lost in a pretend world where I felt strangely happy and secure. I would spin myself in circles on the burlap-bag swing hanging from one of our pine trees, holding my head all the way back and watching the limbs play tic-tac-toe on the blue sky. I’d play with my dolls, bathe them and powder them, dress them and rock them—sometimes without a care in the world. I remember feeling happy then. I’d sit in front of my teenage sister’s vanity mirror, put on her lipstick, and pin up my hair. And for that moment, life felt right. Yet so much was wrong.

  And I was six.

  Most of the time I lived with an unidentifiable sense of foreboding. My big brother tells me that I often looked like I would burst into tears if someone glanced at me cross-eyed. But I can also remember moments of respite that fetched me to a place where I would feel light.

  My love affair with Jesus began at that very point in my life, back in a Sunday school room in a small-town church with linoleum floors and black heel marks. I still cannot explain why someone sitting pretty for an ugly future believed the good press about God. Maybe I just had good teachers. When you’re little, the teachers don’t feel compelled to say, “Now, Jesus loves all of you but mostly just cares about what you boys will be when you grow up.” Nope. There’s none of that. And oddly there never was much of that in my path until I was grown and already knew better. The thought never occurred to me that Jesus didn’t call girls to follow Him alongside the boys. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things but not that one. We might be commissioned to do different things, but Jesus ministers next to men and women alike.

  Always has. In a culture where some sects of Pharisees started their day by thanking God they were not born a woman, Jesus had a passel of women right at His side. See for yourself:

  Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Cuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.

  Luke 8:1-3

  I’m not trying to make too much of this. I’m certainly not suggesting a point of doctrine; rather, I’m simply pointing out some wording that resonated with this former pit dweller. Though the Gospels present “the Twelve” as following Jesus closely after having been called, these women followed Jesus closely after having been cured. Don’t let me confuse you. To be called is a wondrous thing indeed. In fact, that very word is used in reference to the way every Christian, regardless of gender, first comes to Christ (Romans 8:30). But here in this portion of Luke’s eloquent Gospel, alongside “the Twelve” were “also some women who had been cured.” I know the feeling.

  I am so taken with Jesus and so convinced that abundance is in His wake alone precisely because He has done so much to heal me. I should be nothing more than a casualty of sexual abuse and perpetual family dysfunction. My past gave me ample permission to make disastrous decisions, and to prove it I made at least a thousand of them. Despite my own determination to reconfirm how worthless and filthy I was, Jesus just would not let me be.

  He would pull me out of the slime, and I would slink right back into it. He’d pull me out again, and there I’d go again . . . and all the while as saved as that old preacher in my childhood church who dunked my mixed-up head in baptism. I rededicated my life at least fifty times, and still the soles of my feet stuck to the mud like a rat to the goo of a trap. Every time Keith tucks one of those merciless contraptions between the washer and dryer at our place in the woods, I wonder why we don’t kill the poor rodent quickly rather than let it stick there till it dies. I guess I’ve taken it too personally and projected myself right onto its mangy gray coat. There was a time in my life when I was sure I would stick there in the slime till I died. Honestly, I wished someone would just put me out of my misery.

  Then, in His great and wise mercy, God let me see how much my determination to hang on to my messed-up self was going to cost me. Jesus did not scare me to death. He let me scare myself to death. My heart and my mind were sick. Like Paul, I had the desire to do what was good, but for the life of me, I could not seem to carry it out. Mark my words. All the invitation Satan needs to bring destruction to any life is a half inch of duplicity. If we don’t stop feeding that unhealthy part of us—that beast within—over time it will develop the strength of a grizzly and drag the rest of us off as its kill. Nothing tells the enemy that it’s time to wage an attack like that little gap of space between us knowing what we need to do and us doing it. I needed more than a commissioning. Girlfriend, I needed a cure.

  And I got one. In Hosea 14:4 the Lord says, “I will cure them of their unfaithfulness. I will love them freely.”16 That’s what happened to me. God cured me of my own gross unfaithfulness. He healed my unloveliness with His own love. As I live and breathe, I am not the woman I used to be, but the fact is, I started this journey because I wasn’t yet the woman that I wanted to be. Somehow I don’t picture her sitting around fixating on all the delicacies of her inadequacies like I too often have. Surely she feels too good about God to wonder why she doesn’t feel better about herself. I have a suspicion she’s never going to be as perfect as I picture, but the woman I want to become is still a long shot from the one who wrote the first chapter of this book. That’s why I thought I’d better get on with it. God was right to bring me here. He and I have wrestled some things out and won some big victories in the last six months as my insides spilled out all over this subject matter. This has been one of the most vulnerable journeys of my life, but I’m the better for it. And there’s better still.

  As long as we’re here in these human bodies on the topsoil of planet Earth instead of six feet under shoving up weeds, we’ll always have a few places that could use some curing. And we won’t need curing just for our own sakes.

  “What’s your baby sister’s name going to be, Jackson?” I was making conversation with the boy while his parents were away and he tumbled Hot Wheels down Bibby’s stairs like he never could if they were there. I just wanted to hear him say it. I was dying to know again that it was real. I needed to know if the woman-child we were expecting in four short weeks really would be a namesake. I would know his parents hadn’t changed their minds if they were serious enough to tell him, too, because once you’ve told Jackson Jones anything, there’s no untelling it. He can make an elephant look like it had dementia.

  I waited a second or two for him to answer me.

  Nothing.

  Not a single word.

  Just the sound of cars bouncing down the hardwood stairs.

  “Jackson, listen to Bibby. I’m asking you what your baby sister’s name is going to be.”

  “Alphabet,” he answered drily. Authoritatively. His tone was tinged with insult like I had asked something everyone on earth already knew. I hid myself from him and laughed my head off. I could hardly wait to tell his mommy when she came to pick him up.

  Miss Alphabet Jones. I have a feeling she has come to change the way we spell a few labels that dangle from the limbs of our family tree. That’s okay with me. Come on, little girl, and mess with this woman’s life. I did things for your mother and your aunt that I never would have done for myself. They were somehow worth changing for when I wasn’t worth the effort myself. I will do for you, baby girl, what I’ve yet to do even for them.

  Change has come. Annabeth’s mother knows it too. I’ll never forget what Amanda said the very day she and Curtis learned they were having a girl. I’m not sure if she was saying it to me, to herself, to no one in particular, or to God. “A girl. A girl. Oh, man. I’m going to have to deal with some of my stuff. I sure don’t want to give it to her.” You see, there were certain things she could get away with as the mom of a boy without worrying that he’d take it on. Mothers and daughters don’t have that luxury. Neith
er do fathers and sons.

  One of my bloggers expressed the gender connection vividly in a comment to a post about women and insecurity.

  I had just had a pretty emotional talk with my middle school girl. [A little while later I] was praying about our conversation that pretty much revolved around insecurities, and my comment to God was, “She is saying everything that I say to myself still! As a thirtysomething married mother to three! How am I supposed to help her with her insecurities when I can’t get over my own . . . which are awfully close sounding to a preteen girl’s?! How pathetic am I?” Then I came to my computer and went to your blog . . . and I read the post and started sobbing. I want to be free from my insecurities; I fear they are tearing me apart from true friendships and putting a wedge between me and God. And I want to be strong for my daughters. Thanks for listening to me.

  Darling, I wasn’t just listening to you. I’ve been you. But this I know. Just because we have estrogen milking up our bloodstream doesn’t mean we have to carry on the insecurities of a preteen girl. We really can grow up. As hard as it is, we really can take responsibility. We really can find freedom. We can sit around and think about how pathetic we are, or we really can pursue some healing—for ourselves and for that preteen girl. You and I, just like the woman who wrote that comment, have got to make a definitive decision to be strong for our daughters. And don’t even try handing me the excuse that you’re not a mom so this doesn’t apply to you. The entire generation of adult women in any culture is systematically raising the next, whether they mean to be or not. Every acne-faced middle school girl you pass in the mall, texting on her cell phone or checking out that older guy in the food court, is your daughter. What are you going to do about her? What would you be willing to do for her?

  Next time you’re in a public place and a stroller rolls by with a baby girl in tow, know for certain that the woman who’s pushing those wheels isn’t the only one who will teach that child who to become. You will do your part in her life too. And if she just happens to have on a monogrammed pink jacket that says “Annabeth,” I’m going to hope like crazy that she sees in you somebody who thought little girls like her were worth doing what it took.

  It’s time we girls helped each other out.

  Chapter 15

  Looking Out for Each Other

  So how can we women start helping each other out? How can we be part of the insecurity solution rather than an embarrassingly large part of the problem? That’s what we’re throwing on the table in this chapter. Remember the guy from the survey who called us out about our insecurities toward one another? I quoted him in chapter 12, and his comments echoed what plenty of other men implied about women and their insecurities:

  Most obvious is when women are around other women; they try to size each other up and look for reasons to not get along rather than to get along. They seem easily intimidated, whether by physical beauty, character status, or whatever makes them feel that the other woman has more going for her, and a barrier goes up.

  Before we talk about this, I do think it’s safe to say that women don’t always throw up barriers; many of us have long-term, genuine friendships that would be impossible to maintain under those conditions. To be sure, intimidation suffocates the life out of intimacy. But this guy certainly pegged us on too many occasions and encounters. To our relief, what might have been less obvious to him is that women don’t necessarily have open discord with others who intimidate them or make them feel like they don’t measure up. Sometimes we muster or feign confidence or contentment because we are honest enough with ourselves to know that our reaction is inane and self-absorbed. Many of us are well aware that our insecurities, given full sway, would dictate if not utterly destroy every female friendship on the horizon.

  The loss would be incalculable. My good girlfriends are some of the dearest treasures in life to me. They are bright, gifted, hilarious, opinionated, and delightfully different from one another and from me. They make me think and rethink all sorts of decisions and probably deserve as much congratulations on my wedding anniversary as Keith and I. The best of friends talk each other out of the worst of plans. My good friends and I all have some sizable scars on our feet from this thorny sod, so we’re incapable of walking indefinitely in perfect harmony. In the host of words shared between women friends, especially amid colliding hormones, sometimes something gets said that leaves the other pondering the old familiar question: “What in the world was that supposed to mean?” The lure to assume offense becomes a long-handled spoon stirring our hidden insecurities.

  But that’s one of those times when we get to exercise the power of choice. Will I think the best of her or the worst? Will I focus on this exact moment of offense, or will I remember a faithful, long-term friendship? The camaraderie my closest female companions bring to my life is well worth having to occasionally whisper to myself, “What you’re feeling right this minute is stupid. Stop it.”

  Insecurity will rob us of some of the richest woman-to-woman relationships of our lives. It turns potential friends into competitors. It can also cause us to pursue associations out of unwell or impure motives. I’ll pitch out a few examples. Some women completely avoid being around other women who make them feel even slightly inferior, only making friends with those they can successfully look down on. Sick but true. If no one in her closest social circle is remotely as cute as she is, you’re probably staring a perfect example in the pretty face. Others do something just as extreme but on the opposite coast. They attach themselves to women they perceive as superior because they feel like they can at least share a small measure of status by association with them. The plan has its advantages for both parties for a while, but eventually it backfires. Living in a constant shadow has a conspicuous way of turning icy cold.

  Most of us live somewhere between these two extremes. We don’t feel threatened all the time. Just too much of the time. We’re up to our ears in social networking (I like it too), in touch with a hundred women yet especially close to none. We can’t figure out for the life of us why we fight this looming cloud of loneliness. We know we should be happier and wonder why we’re not. Most of the time we have no idea we are scrambling to play our part in a make-believe world. The high-definition images surrounding us at every turn and screen look so real that we forget we’re being vacuumed into a matrix. A constant stream of media and celebrities pressures real women to either try to measure up to pretend lives or admit to failure. We end up feeling like we’re on a runway in our old underwear. Nobody’s clapping, and everybody’s a competitor.

  I have a buddy who is a very popular DJ at a contemporary radio station in Houston. A few months ago, when we had a chance to catch up after an on-the-air interview, she asked me what I was presently researching. When I told her it was women and the honest-to-God pursuit of security, she made a quick and clever comment that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since:

  “Let’s see. Hmmmmm. Secure women. Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  It doesn’t have to be. The insecurities of women have gone viral, and as if our culture is not host enough, now we’re catching it from one another. Call me an optimist, but I have to believe that security could be just as contagious. We’ve talked at serious length about becoming healthier and more secure in our relationships with men. I learned from my survey of over nine hundred women, however, that many females struggle more intensely and frequently with insecurities toward their own gender.

  In this chapter, we’re going to fasten our attention to several ways we can jump-start substantial security in our relationships with other women. Should we choose to adopt it, this kind of perspective could be unique and refreshing enough in our spheres of influence to cause practically any woman near us to notice. She may not be able to define the difference at first, but she’ll know we possess assurance, strength, and grace that she is missing and craves.

  Let’s look at a few things we could do to develop a case of infectious security with our own gender.
/>
  Stop Making Comparisons

  Our constant propensity to compare ourselves to the women around us is wrecking our perceptions of both ourselves and them. Most of us aren’t in a public place for five minutes before we peruse the female players in the room and judge where we rank. Human nature rarely balances itself on the tightrope of equality, despite our noble claims. Far more often in our comparisons to other women, we fall headlong to one side with inferiority or swan-dive to the other side with superiority. A bloody tumble is inevitable either way.

  The nature of our competition depends to a large extent on what we tend to value. If intelligence is high on the list, given the opportunity, we will try to assess whether or not the people around us seem smarter than we are. If appearance is a personal premium, we have the tendency to rate ourselves according to the looks of those in eyeshot. The same is true of talent, giftedness, spirituality, and success. We tend to make our toughest comparisons according to our top priorities.