So Long Insecurity Read online

  meet all your needs according to My glorious riches in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19).

  give you grace that is perfectly sufficient (2 Corinthians 12:9).

  be your power in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

  do immeasurably more than all you could ask or imagine, according to the power that is at work within you (Ephesians 3:20).

  There is so much I don’t know. So much I’m uncertain of. So much that makes me wonder. But sister, I’m certain of this. I promise you, based on the authority of God Himself and centuries of witnesses to His faithfulness, if you will place your trust in Him, He will always—I said always—make sure that in the end you will look upon your foes in triumph. No illness, loss, rejection, or betrayal will ever get the last word. You will stand to your feet stronger than ever. And oh, may your unseen enemy regret the day he set the crosshairs of his weapon upon your forehead.

  Chapter 18

  A Clean Escape

  This has been a messy book. In case you’re wondering if I’m aware of it, I am. Passion isn’t always the best ink. It tends to get splattered and spit instead of scripted thoughtfully and melodiously like notes on a composer’s score. The writer of Proverbs talked of words “fitly spoken,” but I’m afraid what you’ve gotten here were words spoken in a fit. Things are better said in retrospect, but had I waited until I worked through my pathetic insecurity, the pressure would have waned and a written message would never have materialized. The next phase in my life would have come with all its demands, and stopping to look back would have been an unaffordable luxury. If this book is as messy as I fear it is, at least it’s messy in a cleansing sort of way. That can happen, you know.

  My sister-in-law was in Houston recently for a long-overdue visit. She has lived abroad with her family for several years and adjusted to taking trains most places instead of cars. Apparently it’s left her a little rusty on how things are done in the wide-open spaces of Texas, where trains are still best suited for cattle drives and the metro rail system is primarily for people who refuse to drive a pickup truck. While running a few errands, my sister-in-law decided to do her parents a favor and fill up the miniature gas tank of their silver four-door Toyota Corolla. She paid at the pump and fed the tank every ounce it could stomach, and as she stuck the nozzle back in place, she was met with the familiar question on the screen: “Do you want a car wash?” Judging from the layer of dirt coating the back of her pants from where she had leaned on the fender, my sister-in-law decided a double favor was in order.

  She coughed up seven bucks for the SuperWash, drove around to the back side of the convenience store, found the “Enter here” sign, and punched in her six-digit code. The automated voice instructed her to put the car in neutral, and imagining how pleased her parents would soon be, she cheerfully complied. That was the last clear thought she had for the four longest minutes of her life. Some of the details are sketchy, but based on my well-honed investigative skills of peculiar human behavior, this is what I’ve deduced:

  The conveyor belt began pulling her neutralized car into the drive-through as promised, but the automatic voice was still chattering instructions. As my sister-in-law recounts it, she poked her head out the driver’s side window and yelled back at it, “What? What did you say?” If you’re not from our part of the country, where manners trump authenticity and sometimes plain sense, you may not comprehend our reluctance to drive off while someone is still talking. Yes, even if it’s an automated voice of indiscernible gender trapped in a metal box with bad speakers. Around here, it’s just plain rude.

  Exasperated, she turned around just in time for the first squirt. She couldn’t describe the color of it because it hit her square in the eye but as someone experienced in drive-through car washes, I was sharp enough to already know. It was the color of a well-aged woman’s cotton-white hair when it has a tinge of blue rinse from the beauty shop in it. No doubt in my mind. I’ve seen the shade a thousand times at church. In her momentary blindness and considerable surprise, my sister-in-law began slapping frantically at the inside of her car door in search of the electric window switch. Mind you, she had only driven her parents’ car a few times, so it’s perfectly understandable that she hit the button that rolled down the backseat window instead of rolling up the front. What ensued was quite simply the SuperWash of my sister-in-law’s life. By the time she exited the car wash, she’d been primed, shampooed, slapped senseless with long gray rags, and then rinsed and waxed with impressive effectiveness. Only the power dryer at the exit failed to perform comprehensively. Of course, this was no small deficiency in terms of her hair. I have purposely omitted her name to protect her last semblance of dignity, but she knows who she is and by now has sizable reservations about having told me. Good sport that she is, she’ll willingly take one for the team.

  Anyway, I’m not making fun of her. I’m relating. That’s precisely what I’ve endured for the last nine months of toiling over this book. I feel like a person who’s walked barefoot through a car wash and paid good money to do it. The firm slapping with the long gray rags particularly resonates. Lo these many months later, I am considerably cleaner but in serious need of a spa day. Speaking of salons, in case we happen to run into one another someday, perhaps you’re better off knowing in advance what you can expect out of your buddy in the wake of this book. After all, I hate in the worst way to fail to measure up to someone’s expectations, but unfortunately, it’s one of the most predictable job hazards in the briary field of writing. I would rather tell you up front that, should we meet, you could bet your girlfriend a friendly cup of coffee that I’ll still have highlights, still have a manicure or need one, and still be in search of the ultimate smoky gray eyeliner or, better yet, a great pair of jeans.

  I don’t do any of those things out of insecurity. I do them because I like them, not because I don’t like myself or need you to like me. I’m also hard-pressed to find those kinds of things unbiblical unless they’re becoming idols or heaping debts. First Peter 3:3-4 does a brilliant job of reminding women not to get confused about where true beauty emanates from and removes all doubt about the priority of the internal over the external. Taken in context with the whole counsel of Scripture from start to finish, however, you would have a pretty tough time substantiating the idea that it’s wrong for a woman to look her reasonable best as long as it doesn’t teeter the precedence of her character. In actuality, the Bible doesn’t saint plainness or adornment. God simply “doesn’t see things the way [we] see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, NLT).

  My goal in the wake of this journey of heart is to cease being motivated to thought or action in any way by insecurity. From an observer’s perspective, the line may seem fine at times, but to the person herself, the difference in the internal struggle can be as clear as day if she’s willing to pay attention. Insecurity has a certain sick feel to it. A niggling of urgency and desperation. If the feeling gets masked behind a half dozen others, we only have to ask ourselves why we’re thinking what we’re thinking or doing what we’re doing. Insecurity is, above all, an anxious motivator. We can cut straight to the core of our drivenness with these kinds of inquiries:

  Am I doing this . . . or buying this . . . or saying this . . . or selling this out of any semblance of insecurity?

  If the honest answer is yes, then it’s time to be brave and say no. I’m not sure what this plumb line will look like next to your unique life, but I can tell you that next to mine, it means that while the shopping mall is still in, a few other practices and possibilities are probably out because I know good and well they’re motivated by nothing but insecurity. We who are in Christ possess the supernatural insight to know the difference and the divine power to act on it.

  Not long ago we got a blog comment that brought Amanda, Melissa, and me untold joy. Between our two generations and three diverse personalities, we have the privilege of serving all sorts of women of every age and walk of l
ife. We have college students and Web-savvy retirees in our online community, and in between you’ll find occupations running the gamut from anesthesiologists to missionaries. Like most blog communities, ours has its regulars who post comments often enough to become welcome friends. One of them is Sister Lynn. In this case “Sister” isn’t just a figure of speech for a fellow Christian. Lynn is a real, live sister in the ecumenical sense of the word. She and her merry group of social networkers are nuns who log in from the simple world of their convent’s wireless connection.

  Not long ago I wrote a blog post about a song I had been singing repeatedly in the middle of work havoc and a small heartbreak; the words and tender melody reminded me how very much I love Jesus. It’s the kind of song you don’t just sing about Him. You sing it straight to Him. I shared the lyrics on the post and then asked our bloggers to name a song they often sing to Jesus when they either feel the love or want to. Comments poured in like a glad torrent. Bloggers offered hundreds of titles lifted off the charts of Christian contemporary music and peeled from the slick silver pages of ageless hymnbooks. Sister Lynn? She came through with a soulful late-sixties classic by Aretha Franklin. Those of us fortunate enough to be young or sober when R & B was the reigning king of AM radio probably know the chorus by heart. Slow down for a moment before you read her last two lines. You can’t rush a lyric like this. Each syllable was meant to hang like a summer dress on a country clothesline until a woman who’d almost forgotten who she was could feel the breeze blow life back in her lungs:

  “You make me feel like a nat-u-ral wo-man. [Even slower here:] A nat-u-ral wo-o-o-man.”

  I threw back my head and laughed out loud at Sister Lynn’s bold selection, but I also knew exactly what she was talking about. Jesus has been the purest, most consistent romance of my life, and despite the inevitable aches and shocks of living for five decades, somehow with Him my youth is inexplicably renewed. In the light of His presence I am so glad to be a woman and feel oddly adept at it even in a world gone mad. Away from the active awareness of Him, I am at the bitter mercy of my next bad mood. That’s where Sister Lynn would happily consent to being one-upped a tad. Actually, with Jesus, we are so much more than natural women. Remember? We have this Treasure—this all-surpassing power in these imperfect jars of clay. Every time we glance in a mirror, we come face-to-face with a supernatural work of God. So what if our hair color is not exactly natural? Admit it. Sometimes natural is overrated.

  As we wrap things up around here, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the two of us could grab a table at a restaurant and sit right across from each other for a little while? I would ask if God had accomplished anything discernible in your life through the pages of this book, and then I would tell you that the God part of this process has been monumental for me. If, truth be told, it has been substantially less for you, I would also tell you how sorry I am for dropping the ball. Nothing brings me more relief than the absolute certainty that human handprints can’t smudge the face of God when He’s bound and determined to reveal a glimpse of Himself.

  One of the things I love about Him is His strong penchant for authenticity. Neither the hypocritical nor the ill-equipped can use Him as an excuse. If any message, whether in print or in person, was truly His idea and doused in His anointing, He has tested it meticulously on the messenger. In order to prove me genuine as a writer on this subject, God has spent this last year systematically exposing every ugly insecurity I had and testing these methods in circumstances too uncanny to be coincidence.

  For starters, He allowed Keith and me to endure a challenging season that, based on my history, should have turned me inside out with self-doubt. Before we came out on the other side, I got countless opportunities to say to myself, I am clothed with strength and dignity and say silently to anyone or anything that came to rob me of my security, God gave it to me. It is mine. You cannot have it.

  And then one of my dearest loved ones has battled an untimely health crisis in her young adult years, and it is as of yet unresolved. After remaining stalwart on her behalf through months of medical tests, I finally gave way to panic over the growing concern of specialists and was cut to the quick with conviction over the concepts I taught late in this book. One night while driving home from spending the day with her, I spoke these words aloud to God between honest-to-goodness wails:

  “Lord, I am asking You to heal her completely. You know that is the desire of my heart. I love her so much. More than my own life. But neither she nor I will find lasting security in trusting You only to do what we want You to do. My conditional faith is leaving the door wide open for the enemy to torment me. Therefore, with every bit of determination in me, I choose to trust You. Period.”

  There with my face soaked and my throat contorted, I felt my strength return. Amid these two overriding tests of security came the everyday variety that may wear on a person slower but over time are often surer. Like you, I’m too plugged in to real life not to have work issues, personal problems, and relational difficulties. I’ve felt attacked, misunderstood, and criticized at times, probably a lot like you. I’ve also seen somebody another day older in the mirror, and regardless of your age, so have you. I’ve felt afraid of the dark and twice as afraid of the light. I’ve second-guessed my motivation for everything I do.

  And meanwhile, the concepts we’ve discussed in this book have stood the test. Come what may, whether well received or not, God wanted me to be able to hold my head up when this message hits the shelves and know beyond a doubt that I am not the same woman who penned the first page. Storms came, and the methods worked . . . at least on one chronically insecure woman. God and I are a long way from where we started. I’m no longer seriously ticked. Concerned, yes, but I’m now a block or two past ticked. I’ve stumbled through a car wash and had my anger rinsed into passion—a passion that longs to see girls from elementary school to assisted living thrive in their God-given right to security in a culture that is brutal on our gender.

  As we go our separate directions, I want you to know how much I care and how deeply I thank you for taking this journey with me. It began out of my own severe need, but it never would have gone this far without you. Let’s each refuse to give up a single inch of the ground we’ve gained. I do not want to relapse.

  To help instigate an ongoing victory, I’ve written a prayer involving our concepts and supported by Scripture that I plan to use as long as it takes for these thought processes to become second nature to me. You’ll find it at the end of this chapter if you want to join me. Use it any day. Use it every day. Think of it as your maintenance prayer. If life knocks the wind out of you and you lose your grip on a strong sense of personal security, return to the longer prayer journey in chapter 9. That’s your repair prayer. Between the two of them, you should rarely be at a loss for words when you need a fresh gain of security.

  I’m about to shut my mouth, but rest assured, God’s is wide open. He is calling you, beloved. He is summoning you to freedom. He is wooing you to joy. He’s inviting you to live on purpose and spin around with childlike faith in the acute awareness of His love for you. His hand is outstretched. Take your dignity back no matter where you’ve been or what has happened to you. Hold on to your security for all you’re worth. It is yours. Nothing and no one can take it from you.

  The LORD is your security. He will keep your foot from being caught in a trap.

  Proverbs 3:26, NLT

  Now get out there and show some wide-eyed little girls what a secure woman looks like.

  My Father in heaven,

  I thank You for breath this day to give You praise.

  I thank You for a life where nothing is wasted,

  a life where pain turns into purpose and Your providence assigns a personal destiny.

  You will never allow anything in my path

  that cannot bring You glory or me and those around me good.

  No matter what this day holds,

  I am clothed with strength and dignity.

>   I have divine strength to overcome every obstacle and all oppression

  because I belong to Jesus Christ, and His Spirit lives within me.

  You, Lord, are my security.

  No one and nothing can take You from me.

  You will keep my foot from being caught in a trap.

  I choose to turn my back on fear because You are right here with me.

  I can smile over the days to come because Your plan for me is good and right.

  My heart is steadfast, trusting in You, Lord.

  In the end, I will look in triumph on my foes.

  Because of You,

  I, _______________________________, am secure.

  In Jesus’ triumphant name,

  Amen.

  So, You’re Considering Christ

  I could have no greater privilege in all of life than introducing you to a saving relationship with Jesus Christ through a simple prayer you fill with your faith. You will realize as time goes on that no human being could draw you here. This invitation is from Christ alone. He has been pursuing you for years, and now if you are willing and so desire, the time has come to start living the life you were created for. The simplicity of the gospel is often a stumbling block for people. We reason that eternal life in heaven and internal power on earth should take longer to acquire than five minutes, but that’s where we misunderstand who is doing the work.

  Jesus already spent the time, energy, and unimaginable turmoil when He went to the cross. All you’re asked to do is receive the gift He has placed with unbridled affection before you. Once you’ve accepted His gift of grace, you don’t need to ever doubt your salvation again. Your eternal condition is not based on how you feel from day to day. Stand steadfastly on what you know. The very moment you accept Christ as your Savior, you receive His Spirit. Once He resides within you, He will never leave or forsake you. When you die, you will awaken immediately to brand-new life in a glorious Kingdom, where you will be more alive than you ever dreamed of being on earth. Let this matter be settled once and for all. Know that nothing and no one, including you, can sabotage your salvation.