So Long Insecurity Page 25
2. You’re at a crowded restaurant with your man. While waiting for an available table, he and a woman you’ve never met greet each other enthusiastically. She turns out to be a coworker you’ve heard him mention here and there. You had no idea she looked like that. Suddenly, a wave of insecurity wells up inside of you. A fear of some kind is driving it. Learn to instantly identify it. Trade it in for trust.
If you and I were at a sidewalk café having this conversation over cappuccinos, you might be in a position to respond to the second scenario like this: “But Beth, I don’t know if I can trust my man or not. What if I’ve seen red flags and something really is up?”
I’m not talking about trusting your man in the middle of that wave of insecurity, although I deeply hope you can and do. I’m talking about something much less reliant on frail flesh and blood: trusting God. Trusting God with yourself. With your husband. With your job. With your health. With your family. With your friends. With your threat. I’m talking about entering into a transforming, two-sentence dialogue with a very real, very active God who sees all things and is intimately acquainted with everything concerning you:
You: “Lord, I don’t know if I can trust ___________________ or not.”
God: “But can you trust Me?”
Any time insecurity hits, you can be sure that you are afraid of something. The question is, what? The answer could be one of many possibilities depending on our present vulnerabilities, but it can get subtly ignored behind the upheaval of insecurity. You have to look beyond the obvious to see the wind driving the wave. Maybe you could use a jump start so you’ll know the kinds of things you’re looking for. Beneath that sudden outbreak of insecurity:
You may fear proving stupid.
You may fear rejection.
You may fear anonymity.
You may fear being alone.
You may fear being unimportant.
You may fear betrayal.
You may fear being replaced.
You may fear disrespect.
You may fear being hurt.
You may fear pain of any sort.
Nothing has come more naturally to me than fear. I understand the insanity of some of it and the sheer normalcy of most of it. I’m often afraid because the world proves over and over to be a scary place. Like yours, the majority of my fears have been unfounded, but some of them have been almost prophetic—as if my rehearsals did anything at all to make the reality easier. Listen carefully: either way, whether founded or fictional, our fears will never do us a single favor. If fright would somehow insulate us from specific outcomes, I’d say let’s jump out from behind a door and scare ourselves half to death every morning for good measure. If imagining it would keep us from living it, let’s all quit our jobs and spend our days transfixed on the couch in a mental horror flick of our own making. The fact is, fearing something doesn’t jinx it—even though we wish it would. Neither does it prepare us for it. Fear consumes massive amounts of energy and focus and can chew a hole through our intestines, our relationships, and countless great opportunities. At the risk of oversimplifying, the kind of fear we’re talking about is a colossal waste of time.
I used to think that the essence of trusting God was trusting that He wouldn’t allow my fears to become realities. Without realizing it, I mostly trusted God to do what I told Him. If He didn’t, I was thrown for a total loop. Over more time than should have been necessary, a couple of realizations finally dawned on me about this thing I was calling trust: (1) It wasn’t the real thing. (2) It constantly failed to treat the core issue. Trusting God to never let our fears come to fruition doesn’t get to the bottom of where insecurity lurks. It’s too conditional. It suggests that if any of our terrors come to pass, God is not trustworthy after all. If, like me, you tend to think that the essence of trust is counting on God to obey you, go ahead and wave bye-bye from a country mile to any semblance of lasting stability. If we can’t count on God, for crying out loud, who can we count on? In the words of Isaiah 33:6, “He is your constant source of stability” (NET).
Travel the earth and sail the seven seas. Delve into the world’s great philosophies and tinker with its religions if you can risk the time. If you’re candid with yourself, you’ll still discover that there is no other constant than God. Nothing else will hold.
Anyway, when we set certain conditions for trust, we offer the enemy of our souls the perfect playground for toying with our minds. No, he can’t read our thoughts, but he can certainly study our behaviors. Once he pinpoints our emotional Achilles’ heel, he draws back the bow and aims the poisonous dart straight at it. He figures out what we’re most afraid of, and then he taunts us unmercifully with expert marksmanship.
See if this sounds familiar: your teenager is late coming in from a date, and you can’t reach her on her cell phone. You’ve called six times and texted ten. You have her dead and buried in your mind by 1:00 a.m. By the time she tiptoes through the front door, you’ve eaten everything in the refrigerator and overdosed on antacids. Most of the enemy’s power is in his bluff, but he has been around long enough to know that the constant fear of disaster can be as disabling as the disaster itself. Your daughter begs your forgiveness, drops into bed, and sleeps like a baby. You’re up half the night trying to quiet unrequited anguish.
You know somewhere deep down that there’s got to be a better way. And thankfully, there is. In order to plant our feet on solid ground, we can drop the conditions off of our trust and determine that God will take care of us no matter what. Let me say that again.
No matter what.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m stating that if we want to be secure people, this mind-set is a necessity. Sometimes trusting God means taking no further action. That’s when a verse like Psalm 46:10 speaks loudest: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Other times trusting God means regrouping with Him until the fog clears so we know how to take the next step. Nothing can mislead us or make us jump the gun faster than fear. For times like these when action is necessary but not obvious, Proverbs 3:5-6 hits the nail on the head: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take” (NLT). I love the succinct way Psalm 37:3 says something similar: “Trust in the LORD and do good” (NLT).
A couple of years ago God put me through a peculiar exercise that caused a total earthquake in my long-held perception of trust. With your permission, I’d like to replay it to you in the form of a dialogue because when it occurred, it was as if God spoke every word concretely and audibly to me. In reality, what I’ll describe was expressed in my spirit rather than in my physical hearing. After spending years in relationship with God, seeking what He’s like and how He operates in Scripture, I, like many people, can get a sense of something He’s strongly impressing upon me without “hearing” precise words. When thoughts come to me out of the blue that I’m convinced did not originate in my own mind, if they’re consistent with God’s character and sound like something He would say in Scripture, I usually assume it’s Him. Ultimately, time proves whether or not I discerned the voice correctly. If it produces substantial fruit, I know it was God and I was on target. If nothing comes of it, I probably misunderstood or accidentally ascribed it to Him. None of us are beyond confusing our own thoughts with God’s, no matter how many times we’ve been around the bend with Him.
That said, here’s what happened. God saw me in inner turmoil again about a relentless relational challenge, and while I was wrestling before Him in prayer, my stomach twisted like a wrung-out wet rag, He interrupted.
Child, tell Me your worst fears.
I was a little taken aback. After all, I was in the throes of a particularly descriptive lament. Still, in my human estimation, He had no doubt spoken, so who was I to ask Him to wait His turn? I did what He requested. I told Him my worst fears. Then He “said” something I never could have anticipated, and this, beloved, is precisely what I mean by “out of the
blue.”
Let’s say those things happened.
Trust me when I tell you, that is not what I wanted to hear from God. I wanted reassurances like, “I will never let any of those things happen to you.” I sensed Him continue the interaction despite my bewilderment and dread.
Beth, picture yourself going through the whole process of one of your worst fears becoming a reality. Get all the way to the other side of it. What do you see there?
So I did. I saw myself getting the news I feared most, bawling my eyes out, grieving a loss, or going through all the emotions of betrayal. The tears stung in my eyes. Butterflies flew to my stomach. My insides turned out. But something odd happened on the other side. I’ll use a specific example to illustrate the process:
One of the fears I confessed to God was that, in my older years, Keith would stop loving me and fall for somebody else. Somebody younger. After all, a few of his good friends had done exactly that. It wasn’t unreasonable. It’s not like it doesn’t happen. I pictured my worst-case scenario: not only would Keith find someone new, my daughters would also love and embrace her. Now that would be a nightmare.
Okay, Beth, you did a good job thinking up something terrible. What then?
That’s when I figured out what God was after. He and I both knew what I would do. I would be devastated at first. I would probably sin in my anger and say all sorts of things and act all sorts of ways I would live to regret. I would feel inexpressibly lonely and rejected and probably old and ugly. But I knew that finally I’d go facedown before God just as I have a hundred other hard times, accept His grace and mercy, believe Him to take up my cause and work it together for good, and then I would get up and choose to live.
The excruciating emotional exercise was the best thing God ever could have asked from me. He knew I had pictured the devastation and defeat over and over, but I had never gotten any further than that in my imagination. It was as if He said, “As long as you’re going to borrow trouble on the future, why don’t you just go ahead and borrow the grace to go with it and see yourself back up on your feet defying your enemy’s odds . . . just as you and I have done a dozen other times.”
Even now I could clap my hands over it. The devil took a harsh blow that day because I’ve never fallen back into that old pattern of thinking. And further, the victory over such a long-term mental stronghold caused me to entertain the thought that I could be equally free from my lifelong battle with insecurity. After all, the two are inseparable. These days I far less often pray, “Lord, I trust You to . . .” I simply try to say over and over again, “Lord, I trust You. Period.”
I’ve always been afraid of losing my most cherished loved ones. When giving way to particularly advanced forms of self-torment, I have even pictured myself at their caskets (morbid, I know, but don’t try to tell me you haven’t done it). But I never once pictured myself several years later, back on my feet to the glory of God, heart sore and scarred but pouring my life into hurting people. Helping other people get through what I’ve gone through is redemption to me. It’s the only way on earth to plunder the pain.
Of course, I realize God would prefer for me to refrain from rehearsing those kinds of fears altogether, but He also knows my weaknesses and how deeply and subconsciously I associate love with risk. As long as I insist on torturing myself with these terrifying possibilities, He seems to suggest that I think them all the way through to the other side. The prospect of losing a loved one is horrifying. I cannot imagine enduring it, but because I know God is faithful, I must trust that somehow I would. Can you bring yourself to believe that you would as well?
God has promised that His grace will be given according to our need and that not only will we survive by the skin of our teeth, if we trust Him and hang on to Him for dear life—grieving, yes, but as those who have hope—we will also thrive again. We can give ourselves to something greater than painlessness. We can give ourselves to purpose. If we cooperate, good will indeed come to us and others around us, and glory will most assuredly come to God. Otherwise, He would have forbidden the tragedy. Those of us who are in Christ will also spend eternity with the loved ones who have shared our faith, and this life will seem like a vapor in comparison.
Romans 8:18 promises that the future we have coming is so glorious that nothing we’ve suffered will compare to the magnitude and splendor of it. We must not let the enemy of our souls get away with convincing us that anything can utterly destroy us. If we do, we will hand him an engraved invitation to attend our constant torment. Over and over Jesus implores His followers, “Take courage!” as if His hand is outstretched and His palm opened with offered treasure. It’s time we took Him up on it. Do we really want to spend our time rehearsing deaths of all kinds rather than engaging in the effervescence of life? In the words of Shakespeare, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”
When I got sick and tired of my lifelong battle with insecurity and began this bumpy journey, I found a segment of Scripture that has since become my mantra. The portion echoes in rich tenor everything we’ve talked about in this chapter. It describes a human with an honest-to-goodness secure heart, and I was bound and determined to become one. I have no idea how many times I’ve recited this passage over the last twelve months. I voiced it as recently as yesterday and often enough in recent weeks to taste the lingering sweetness on my tongue from sipping through that straw of truth. For our present purposes, I don’t think God will mind one bit if we change the “he” to “she” for impact.
[She] will have no fear of bad news; [her] heart is steadfast, trusting in the LORD. [Her] heart is secure, [she] will have no fear; in the end [she] will look in triumph on [her] foes.
Psalm 112:7-8
Absorb the statement again: Her heart is secure. As our journey narrows toward its end, imagine those words being used to describe you and me. Let’s make a pact this moment and this close to our conclusion to not let up until our hearts are consistently secure. Those words are vastly truer of me today than they were nine months ago. Fix your eyes upon the bookends propping up those four glorious words:
She will have no fear of bad news. . . . Her heart is secure. . . . She will have no fear.
You and I know by now that a chronically insecure person is invariably eaten alive with fear. Some of us have lived with it so long it feels like part of the fabric of our souls, but the time has come to treat the unhealthy variety as an enemy alien. The most repetitive command God gives His people in the entire stretch of Scripture is “Do not fear!” When we began this chapter, we talked about trading our present fear for trust in order to take the wind out of insecurity’s sails. It will have no choice but to hit the ground like a kite with no air. Take note of the very specific fear the person in Psalm 112 traded for trust.
[She] will have no fear of bad news. (emphasis mine)
I don’t think the psalmist meant that the person described had a lifetime guarantee from God that he would never get any bad news. Hard things happen to all of us, and they often come in the form of “news.” It’s part of pumping blood on this fretful planet. The psalmist meant just what he said. She doesn’t live in fear of bad news. Why is she free from such self-torment? Stay with me here, because this connection is crucial: she is free because she knows that “in the end [she] will look in triumph on [her] foes.” Translation? God will work all things—no matter how difficult or devastating—out to her advantage. Her enemy will not triumph over her. It may hurt in the beginning, but it’s going to be beautiful “in the end.”
The teacher in me loves nothing better than tying two dangling concepts into one big, fat, beautiful bow. Let’s do that right this minute. Remember our key verse in Proverbs 31 that we learned to recite to ourselves every time we feel insecure? I’ll refresh your memory. Proverbs 31:25 says of an extraordinary woman of valor, “She is clothed with strength and dignity.” That’s only half the verse, however. It’s time we looked at the rest.
&nbs
p; She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come.
Both Psalm 112:7-8 and Proverbs 31:25 describe secure people. Not coincidentally, they have one profound characteristic in common. Neither gives the future the right to intimidate them. Their hearts are “steadfast, trusting in the LORD.” Insecurity feeds like a starving wolf off fear of the future—and not just the distant future of aging, infirmity, or death. Insecurity fears what might happen later today. Tonight. Tomorrow. Next week. Next year. Next decade. Its constant mantra is, “What will I do if . . . ?” Fear of the future makes people settle for things in the present that completely defy abundant life. It also insults the grace of God that will be piled in heaps for us when hardship comes. We agonize over how we’ll possibly make it, yet all the while we can glance over our shoulders and see where God has carried us. And often through worse than what we’re afraid of now.
When you feel that familiar panic begin to rise in your heart like a river coursing its banks and your soul begins to roll with another round of “What will I do if . . . ?” what would happen if you were willing to hear the voice of God whisper these inaudible words?
Child, you are asking the wrong question. Here’s the one that would assuage your fears: What will God do if . . . ?
Here’s a smattering of answers to that mighty good question. I, the Maker of heaven and earth, will:
perfect everything that concerns you (Psalm 138:8, KJV).
work all things together for your good (Romans 8:28).
contend with those who contend with you (Isaiah 49:25).
fight this battle for you (2 Chronicles 20:15).
equip you with divine power (2 Corinthians 10:4).
delight to show you mercy (Micah 7:18).