So Long Insecurity Read online

  We could be laid off from work, but instead of seeing it as a bad break, we feel totally rejected. Someone we want to be attentive to us might suddenly have a preoccupation like a family crisis or a health problem. The shift may feel like rejection when it’s not.

  But let there be no confusion. Real rejection does indeed occur, and when it does, it’s a mind bender. Unfortunately, it is possible to suffer the crushing rejection of a parent, a friend, an associate, a stepchild or child, a boyfriend, or a spouse even if it’s never admitted or addressed. No matter the source, the shout translates into the language of the soul as one jolting message: I do not want you! Here’s the even trickier part: nothing elicits quicker concurrence on our part than feeling rejected. Our equally deceptive agreement with the original lie doubles the strength of the bond, and through that betraying handshake, we find ourselves nodding. You are so right . . .

  I’m not worth wanting.

  I’m not worth loving.

  I’m not even worth liking.

  I’m not worth pursuing.

  I’m not worth fighting for.

  I’m not worth keeping.

  I’m not worth hiring.

  I’m not even worth noticing.

  Henceforth and until healing comes, we plot our course out of a smoldering sense of worthlessness. It’s that powerful. Rejection doesn’t have to happen in childhood for it to pitch someone into profound insecurity. Even grown women with comparatively successful track records personally and professionally can sustain a rejection that nearly sends them over the edge. In fact, if we’re not careful, we could dangle right there on that fragile cliff for the rest of our lives and appear to everyone who comes in close contact with us as a person on the brink of breaking. Be careful not to give too much credence to the old adage that time heals. Mark my word. It’s God that heals. Time only tells. The passage of days, weeks, and years can as easily amplify an old voice as weaken it. Given enough time, rejection will set up history to repeat itself over and over until the rejected person forms relationships based on the likelihood that she’ll be rejected.

  I know no other way to say it. Taken badly enough, rejection can muster up some temporary insanity. Reflect on your own history, and I imagine you’d come up with the same summation that I would: the craziest, most uncharacteristic things I’ve ever done have occurred in the wake of major rejection. It’s insecurity with a serious fever. Yesterday my daughter Melissa was talking about a friend who was devastated over being dropped by a guy who had hardly raised her brow prior to his abrupt exit. The fact is, she was basically using the dude to have a dating life until somebody she liked better came along. Melissa said, “You know, Mom. It’s that rejection thing. There’s nothing like it to make you obsessed with someone you didn’t even want.” How true is that?

  I’ll tell you something else I’ve noticed about women and rejection. We tend to wear it like a sign. You can’t always tell right away when someone has come from an unstable home or endured a significant loss, but in thirty minutes flat a discerning eye might make out a woman who has been rejected. No matter how we try to disguise it, there it hangs in neon red. We try to act self-assured, but the light still flashes: “Vacant.” “Lonely.” “Desperately available.”

  Rejection has a nasty way of making the healthy people we’re hoping to attract hightail it like a scared rabbit the opposite direction. Last night our family and some friends went to an Italian restaurant in a swanky part of Houston to celebrate a special occasion. My grandson, Jackson, was sitting right beside me and downing a sizable Sprite through a straw, so about halfway through the meal I did what any good grandmother would do. I asked him if he thought we’d better head to the potty. Of course, any chance of getting up from the table was fine by him, so his feet hit the floor before I could finish the question. As we were making our way to the restroom, we passed the bar, where two women wearing very short skirts and extremely low tops were perched on stools. I don’t mean the sexy kind; I mean the pathetic kind. This wasn’t just cleavage. It was like bulls busting from the pen. I’m talking about the kind of exposure that leaves no hint of mystery. The why-bother-getting-to-know-me kind. The kind that screams, “I’m desperate! I’ll do anything! I’ll take anyone!”

  The thing about it is that I love all kinds of women—I guess because I’ve been so many of them. The jagged death trap of thinking that we’re only as valuable as we are sensual and that if no one loves us, at least they could want us is all too familiar to me. My heart wrenched over those two women, and they might have even caught me staring for a few seconds, but not for the reasons they probably supposed. I could’ve been them back in the day. I’ve been that desperate. I thought how I’d give just about anything to know their stories and tell them mine. They weren’t looking for me to shimmy up on the next stool, however. They were trying to get the attention of the men at the other end of the bar who were trying equally hard to get the attention of that cute twenty-year-old hostess at check-in. There’s no telling what those women had been through, but you could probably take this one to the bank: somewhere along the way, they had been dumped on their uncovered behinds. They were both wearing rejection and begging for more. It broke my heart.

  Sleazy is certainly not the only way rejection dresses. It has a much larger wardrobe than that. You’ll just as often see it dressed down and defeated or cold, acrid, and cynical. One thing is for certain: when we bear it, we wear it.

  And let’s not get the idea that women are the only gender reeling from rejection. Nobody takes this one well. We’re not going to jerk up a single root of insecurity that would not also grow into a choking vine in a man. The point is, generally speaking, the way men and women behave in the aftermath can differ substantially. Take romantic rejection, for instance. Where a man might turn to a string of superficial relationships in which he never gives his heart away, a woman might give her heart away before she even has a relationship. Of course, the reverse can also happen. We’re only talking in gender tendencies here.

  We’ll run into the topic of rejection a few more times before the end of our journey and learn how to break out of insecure mind-sets like the reject mentality. For now, rest assured that it’s a major root of insecurity. If you’ve suffered a serious case of rejection, you need to make sure that you’re letting God tend to it. Each root we’ve mentioned so far is painful, but this one is poisonous. Putting up a front doesn’t work. That neon light has a way of burning through every cover we throw on it. God knows exactly what happened and what a toll it took. He knows the number it played on your mind. Let Him bring you peace. Let Him tell you you’re worth wanting, loving, even liking, pursuing, fighting for, and, yes, beloved, keeping. Whatever you do, don’t reject the only One wholly incapable of rejecting you.

  I have chosen you and have not rejected you. So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.

  Isaiah 41:9-10

  Dramatic Change

  Some people really do have reasonably stable homes and haven’t suffered a major loss. I don’t happen to know many of them, but surely they exist out there somewhere. Goodness knows, I probably don’t interact with many personally because I tend to attract recovering wrecks like myself. Of course, I prefer the term redeemed over recovering wrecks, but I’d answer to either one as long as you’ll let me tell you about my Redeemer and Recoverer. You might be one of those rarities who has enjoyed a fair amount of stability and a minimal amount of loss, but none of us can avoid change. In fact, you can’t get past the delivery room without experiencing sudden and dramatic change. We take our first breath of terrestrial air in total shock. Christ alone is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). We, on the other hand, are in constant, hair-raising, stomach-turning flux. As the old saying goes, nothing stays the same but change.

  Most women find a tremendous amount of security in sameness. Sometimes we’ll stay in a destructive situation because we reason that what we know is better
than what we don’t know. We’ll stay in a job we hate because we’d have to change insurance companies. We’ll keep going to a church God has long since prompted us to leave, because it’s what we know. We’ll stay best friends with somebody we haven’t liked in ten years because it’s too much trouble to make a new one. And anyway, the new friend might want us to change. And we hate change. If we’re big enough control freaks, we might manage to keep a handful of things the same, but to be sure, we don’t just hold on to them; we strangle them half to death.

  But then, some of us experience bigger changes than these. Dramatic changes. Changes that change everything. A skiing accident, a bankruptcy, or a stock market crisis. Hearing from your nine-year-old that your ex-husband is getting remarried. Finding out from the obstetrician that three babies are showing up on that sonogram. You see, dramatic change isn’t always bad, but it’s always big. Our security is easily threatened by anything unknown yet suddenly unavoidable.

  Many of us have learned the hard way that one phone call from a relative or an employer can be the end of life as we know it. Even when we know that God is in the picture and every end leads to a new beginning, right at that moment of discovery, we tend to feel that everything wonderful is over. Does it suddenly sound like we’re talking about loss again instead of change? As we keep digging around for roots of insecurity, we’re going to find that most of them are intertwined underground. Case in point: our hearts often translate sudden and dramatic change as either instability or a form of loss. Sometimes it hits us as both.

  When I was fifteen years old, my dad moved our family from a small Arkansas town where we’d lived for thirteen years to Houston, Texas, the biggest city in the South. I went from a high school of 900 to one splitting at the seams with 4,700 kids. That dramatic life change not only brought a heightened sense of instability to an already unstable home, it also brought the loss of lifelong peers—many of whom I needed to lose, incidentally. Though change ended up working in my favor, the process of working through that loss was still difficult.

  I chose to make dramatic change a category of its own because even though it’s such a fact of life in the human experience, we tend to dismiss its potential impact on our souls. But a history of unwelcomed changes can be a breeding ground for insecurity, because it invites you to become addicted to dread. You learn to live life with the constant expectation that something bad is about to happen. And because life is life, eventually something bad will happen, deepening your commitment to forecasting doom. You develop into your own false prophet, and if you don’t stop yourself, you won’t rest until you’re proved true. It’s a miserable trap of self-inflicted insecurity. You can cheat yourself of ever enjoying the terrific season you’re experiencing because you’re waiting any moment for it to change—and always for the worse. When we become psychologically dependent upon crisis, it actually becomes our life motivator, and if we don’t have a present crisis, we’ll learn to create one.

  The truth is, God uses change to change us. He doesn’t use it to destroy us or to distract us but to coax us to the next level of character, experience, compassion, and destiny. I hate to display such a firm grasp of the obvious, but how will we ever change if everything around us stays the same? Or what will ever cause us to move on to the next place He has for us if something doesn’t happen to change the way we feel about where we are? God is thoroughly committed to finishing the masterpiece He started in us (Philippians 1:6), and that process means one major thing: change.

  Don’t be misled, my dear brothers and sisters. Whatever is good and perfect comes down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens. He never changes or casts a shifting shadow. He chose to give birth to us by giving us his true word. And we, out of all creation, became his prized possession.

  James 1:16-18, NLT

  Personal Limitations

  A learning disability can sow a harvest of insecurity. So can a physical handicap, abnormality, or anything that makes us feel particularly different or inferior. Sometimes limitations are matters of perception. Something one person finds almost debilitating might seem trivial to an observer. Acne is a prime example. A girl struggling with a bad complexion at a hard age might feel humiliated and inhibited by it, while her parents can’t figure out why she’s making such a big deal out of it. After all, they reason, it will pass soon enough. On the other hand, maybe the parents do everything they can to help the situation, but the invitation to inferiority persists. What happens then?

  Attitude is everything when it comes to limitations, and the way you view yourself will acutely shape how others view you. Nothing is more impressive than a person who is secure in the unique way God made her. A very good friend of mine taught me to look at limitations as providential redirections. Years ago I received a phone call that ended up totally changing the course of my life. Lee Sizemore worked for the largest Christian curriculum publisher in the world. He explained that he had a vision for video-driven Bible courses and he wondered if I would consider being one of the teachers. Though I would be teaching in front of a small studio audience, our target would be women watching the video in their living rooms, churches, and classrooms.

  The concept had almost zero appeal to me; I couldn’t imagine teaching a group of women I couldn’t see. The interaction is what I enjoy most in any class setting. I was also very satisfied doing what I was doing. Lee said he and a small team would like to come to Houston to meet with me, and if the idea still didn’t strike a chord, they would know God was leading them elsewhere. You cannot imagine my surprise when a man with slightly disfigured hands and feet came rolling up to me in a wheelchair. He had not been on his feet in years and would not be on his feet again until he stood before his very wise Maker in heaven. What I didn’t realize then was that the very format I initially resisted would eventually become the engine that drove everything else God would call me to do. Those video series took us all over the world, and don’t think for a second that Lee let us go on location without him. We wheeled him up the Mount of Olives and down the streets of old Jerusalem and across a boat ramp to Greece, Turkey, and the islands of the Mediterranean.

  Before all was said and done, that “handicapped” man produced over one hundred video series with numerous authors and was used of God to change the entire face of Bible study in America. And all from a wheelchair. I am absolutely convinced that Lee’s mind and vision went as far and wide as they did because his body was trapped in that chair. His disability was actually his freedom. His limitations in one area redirected his full release to another like a pressure cooker that had finally found a spout. His wheelchair took him somewhere the strongest legs never could have carried him.

  Lee is one of countless examples we have of people who display security in spite of limitations The great writer Anne Rice had a learning disability that made reading extremely difficult even through young adulthood. Ironically, from that very travail with words, numerous best-selling novels were born.

  I’m not trying to lead a pep rally here. I’m simply telling you what I believe is gospel truth: God can bring freedom and vision to your life because of those limitations that you would never have discovered without them. You can let your limitations make you either insecure or unstoppable.

  Personal Disposition

  It is possible that you know people who have experienced the kinds of situations I’ve just described—instability, loss, unwanted change, or limitations—but are as genuinely secure as anyone you’ve ever met. On the other hand, you might know someone who has experienced the best life has to offer, yet is so insecure you can hardly stand to be around her. What is the difference? Sometimes it boils down to our most basic personal components: disposition and temperament. Although insecurity and sensitivity are not synonymous, people who are especially tenderhearted are significantly more predisposed to insecurity.5 In other words, the more tenderhearted we are, the more vulnerable to insecurity we’ll likely be. Some people take things hard
er and deeper to heart than others. It’s not a matter of weakness. It’s a matter of personal sensitivity.

  I don’t know how it hits you, but identifying disposition as a possible contributor brought me significant relief and understanding. Even though my childhood abuse and unstable home offered ample ammunition for insecurity, I have come to the conclusion that, with my hypersensitive disposition, I probably would have battled it to some extent anyway. I feel everything. My joys are huge, and so are my sorrows. If I’m mad, I’m really mad, and if I’m despondent, I wonder how on earth I’ll go on. Then I get up, pour some coffee, and move on to the next emotion and forget how depressed I was an hour ago. Ever done that? Most of the time my emotional nerve endings are exposed like live wires. I can’t even see a smashed toad on the pavement without feeling sorry for it. I boycott movies where animals die and could still use a counseling session over My Dog Skip.

  Perhaps you’ll be relieved to know that my sensitivity does reach further than animals. When I see people saying an emotional good-bye to one another at the airport, it is everything I can do not to embrace them in a group hug. For the next half hour, I’ll think about them so much that I’ll write their whole story in my head. I feel such pity for elderly people who live alone that I have to force myself not to go straight to the pound and fetch them a stray dog. Imagine their faces when they opened the front door. Yep. That’s what has kept me from doing it. I’m afraid I’ll get bitten. (And I don’t mean by the dog.) God gave me this tender heart, and though I want to give up my chronic insecurity, I really do want to hang on to my heart. I like to feel. When I don’t feel something, it’s like being dead.