Theory and application are two equally important aspects of any successful endeavor. When the two work together in perfect unity, it is increasingly hard – near impossible, even – to derail a person who has a firm grip on both. Theory gives us the ins and outs of how a situation works, and application is the practical utilization of theory in our every day life. Without theory, there can be no effective application, and everything that works runs off of luck and coincidence.
Ever since becoming a Christian at age 14, I have read, written, thought on, concentrated, memorized, and recited God’s truth about who I am in Christ Jesus. I have highlighted verses in my Bible that speak of my worth as an heir of God. I have wasted half a tube of my favorite lipstick writing scripture on all of the mirrors in my old apartment. I have even allowed my friend, Kayla, to write down her favorite things about me and taped them in places where I would be forced to read them every day.
I know who the Bible says I am, in and out. I could tell you what my friends and family would positively say about me without even having to think about it. I could describe, in detail, the ways others would praise me, support me, encourage me, and build me up in the gifts God has given me. I could even cite multiple facebook photo comments where people even called me pretty.
So much theory…
Before The World Race, I could honestly say I was living in zero application of the aforementioned. I felt a dreadfully worthless, drab, ugly, and stupid person almost all of the time. No amount of praise could lift me up, no degree of consolation could make me feel better about myself. If I did something right, all I could focus on were the aspects of the thing that were left undone or less excellently executed than the rest. Any kind comment or word from a friend was quickly fettered with a negative one that I allowed Satan to consruct. In all ways, in all things, in all dealings… I just wasn’t worth it.
This isn’t a new concept for me. In fact, this has been the greatest spiritual struggle of my entire life. I remember struggling with these feelings as far back as early childhood, and I can honestly say I don’t remember an aspect of life when I wasn’t dealing with inadequacy, the fear of failure, the pain of unworthiness.
Satan knows your weakest areas. He’s the one that’s been pushing your buttons in that arena relentlessly, over the course of your entire life. He’s not going to let up when you try to push against him. If you could overcome your greatest and most debilitating struggle, where else could he so poignantly attack you? Where else could he achieve as much success? Of course he’s not going to attack your entire body, he’s going to send ten legions of demons, armed to the teeth, sniping your Achilles Heel.
Since The World Race has started, I’ve seen him attack me in my weakest and most vulnerable state, over and again. And yet, I’ve never felt so empowered to stand against him, to look him in the eye and boldly call his lies exactly that. I’ve never felt so encouraged, so loved, so valued by a group of people as I do my team and my squad. When they speak life, these poisonous arrows that have infected me drop like flies. The love, prayer, and support of those around me acts as a balm that heals all the open wounds left behind. I am finally starting to see who I am in Christ, why my identity in Him is the only one that defines me, and start to believe all these truths I’ve only known in theory.
Application, my friends, has finally intersected with theory on Shannon Morgan Boulevard. And what a beautiful crash it is!
I walk with greater confidence than I ever have before. I speak with authority, knowing my words come from Christ and not myself. Most days, I look in the mirror and, despite messy hair and eyebrows in desperate need of a waxing, I am glad to see the person looking back. Such huge strides, all in such a relatively short period of time. The Shannon who lived in constant fear, anxiety, depression, and worthlessness has metamorphisized into someone I wouldn’t have ever recognized in my own skin.
And yet, despite such tremendous victory, some days, it’s absolutely not there.
Some days, even when I call Satan’s lies what they are, a lone soldier breaks through my defenses and starts ravaging my confidence. Once I’m weakened, he invites a thousand of his closest friends to join him.
How do these things happen? I’m not too sure, but I know that the day I don’t have any more struggles will be the day I turn into God, which isn’t something I would recommend you start holding your breath about.
So, even considering the newfound freedom I have in myself and in Christ, these days still occur from time to time. Different things trigger them, and when it happens, I start inverting myself and keeping my ideas and feelings hush-hush. Usually, someone notices and drags it out of me before too much time passes, but even then, I’m usually reluctant to share how I’m truly feeling.
The first thing attacks of unworthiness take out of you is your right to feel like a human being, your right to feel loved and beautiful, your right to feel secure and accepted. When one of my teammates, who I know blindly loves me, figures out how I’m feeling and starts speaking into me, that unworthiness kicks up every kind of lie and distraction to counter the truth that is being spoken. Always, in the end, I feel better about myself and know that I am loved, which starts to pull me out of my pit. However, the initial reaction is to always bury what you feel so that you can continue on in the mindset that you are worthless, stupid, and unlovable.
“You’re absolutely pitiful, a brainless moron could have represented themself better than you”,
“You just think your team loves you, but in their heart, they believe you’re a liar and can’t wait to throw you under the bus”,
or the ever-so-familiar,
“So what if you didn’t do anything wrong? Just breathing makes you subject for open mockery and ridicule, because no one in the history of time has ever been as much of a screw-up as you.”
Now, don’t all of these illustrations seem absolutely ridiculous? Hyperbole at it’s finest. And yet, in my own head, it eerily starts to make profound sense. Like my older sister says, the coat rack looks so much more like a monster in the dark than it does in the light, and I was letting monsters run unchecked in the silent darkess of my mind.
A few days after the incident, I was feeling overwhelmingly sad. I felt like the most fitting representation of my mindset would be to stamp EPIC FAIL across my facebook profile picture. I thought posting a blog about a fun day I had with Don and Anthony would make me feel better. Rather, it just made me miss Anthony terribly. I kept thinking about how, on other days when I was feeling down, he would always cheer me up, make me laugh, and have zero tolerance for my sadness.
Feeling physically sick from my sorrow, I tucked myself deep into my sleeping bag and tried to escape the world for a little while. When I awoke, I didn’t feel any better at all. I walked into the sanctuary of the church we were staying in, sat down on the floor, and tried to hold back what I was feeling.
As I was sitting, my tender-hearted, beautiful, loving teammate, Kendra, walked over and rubbed my back. She asked me how I was feeling, and before I knew it, I was crying puddles on the floor. She sat down, and we had a good cry together.
I told her how stupid I felt, how sick I was of Satan getting to me, how much I missed my dad, how I’d give my eye teeth for an Anthony hug, how I’d like to have the misunderstanding completely erased, how I was feeling unpretty, how I wanted to be okay on the inside, and how I would really like to walk to the store and buy a Coke. Basically, she got an earful of everything that had leaked into my life over the silence of the previous days, and she loved me through it all.
The bulk of the conversation hinged on how I was struggling with worth. I said,
The thing about unworthiness is that it automatically takes out every defense you have. By zeroing in on your self-worth and taking it out, you can’t defend any other aspect of yourself. You don’t even want to. You don’t feel worthy to feel confident in anything, to feel beautiful, to feel smart, to feel helpful or to even feel offended by the accusations in your mind. No, all you feel is worthlessness.
It’s like the game, Jenga. When you take out the foundational block, everything else topples to the ground. You can’t pull out the bottom block and expect to have anything left to defend, because once it’s gone, there’s nothing left at all. In order to even get back to where you were, you have to start by laying that foundation again and building everything else from there. Kendra, I’m so tired of having my foundation yanked out from underneath me. I want to cement it into the ground and know without a doubt that nothing Satan can pull is going to destroy that foundation. Nothing.
After our talk, I felt so much lighter, so much better. Over the course of the next few days, I shared all of what I was feeling with Ken, and in turn, opened up to the rest of my team. And, of course, they were absolutely loving and concerned only with building me back up. Just like Jenga.
So, a few days later, I walked into the sanctuary again. This time, my mind was clear and I had been meditating on what it meant to truly find my identity in Christ. I walked over to the back corner of the room, where Kendra and I had sat on the floor merely days before and cried together.
“Look up.”
Above my head, right above the spot where I had sat and cried a few days earlier, was an air-conditioning vent. And, as I live and breathe, there was something stuck in the vent. I raised myself up on tip-toes, and my mouth dropped at what I saw.
Sticking out of the air-conditioning vent was a Jenga block.
A Jenga block. As in, it had the word “Jenga” engraved into it. As in, here I am in a middle-of-nowhere village church in Israel, and here’s a Jenga block stuck in the air vent. As of this very moment, I have yet to see a board game of any type in this country, and I most certainly know that, without a doubt, there wasn’t one solitary board game in that entire church.
My friend, take heart. Our foundation is not built upon theory. It is not constructed by how successful we are, how smart, how beautiful or handsome, how graceful, how athletic, how wise.
And Shannon, take heart. Your foundation is not built upon how many times you get this thing right, and certainly not on how many times you wind up face-down in your own futility. It is not built upon how many days you look in the mirror and like what you see, neither is it built on the days that you can’t even bear to hold one up to your face. It is not built upon how many people think you are honorable, trustworthy, and reliable, and neither is it built upon those who think you are a lying, two-faced thief. It isn’t built upon how loved you feel, or don’t feel, any given day of the week. It isn’t built upon how many people around you love and care for you, and it isn’t built upon those that don’t love or care about you at all. It isn’t built upon how many people think you’re wonderful, and it isn’t built upon how many people hate you, either.
The next morning, during our prayer time, Ken was playing music for all of us on his computer. As I was giving all of this up to God, a very familiar song filled the room, and Christ overwhelmed me in the powerful words of an old hymn:
I dare not trust the sweetes frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.
On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.
All other ground is sinking sand.
As I continue this development into the Woman of God I was created to be, I have a beautiful, quirky reminder of who I am, tucked into the deepest pocket of my backpack. I feel as if from now on, when I hear Jesus’ parable of the wise builder, I won’t be envisioning a solid rock. Rather, I see a mountain-sized Jenga block, secured in God’s love, as a foundation for everyone who finds their identity in Christ Jesus.
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the (block).”
Matthew 7:24-25
