Jeremiah 17: 5&6– “This is what the Lord says: ‘Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans, who rely on human strength and turn their hearts away from the Lord. They are like stunted shrubs in the desert, with no hope for the future. They will live in the barren wilderness, in an uninhabited salty land.'”
Throughout this race, the Lord has been showing me a LOT about my own insecurities. I’ve known for a while that I struggle a lot with insecurities, but it wasn’t until this race that the Lord showed me just how deep they ran. They manifested themselves in all kinds of scary ways:
-always seeking the approval of people around me
-always trying to make myself better in order to get people to like me
-really overwhelming jealousy
-craving attention
-generally feeling unloveable
No matter how much I tried to fix this stuff inside of me, it never worked. It usually just made it worse by making me feel like a failure. And it went even deeper than I originally thought. By the end of the second month, I finally admitted to myself that deep down, I didn’t really believe that the Lord loved me. I had no doubt of His love for every other human being on the planet, but I just didn’t think that He could actually love me. I guess I thought I was too messed up, and definitely not good enough to earn His love. So of course I didn’t think others could ever really love me– if my own Maker didn’t love me, how could anyone else? I had no foundation, no true identity that wasn’t swayed by whoever was immediately surrounding me. I was that stunted shrub in the desert. I based my identity on whatever I thought was most appealing to the people around me, and I craved their approval above all else. They were my idols.
So finally, at the end of Romania, I hit a breaking point. I was tired of trying to convince myself of His love. So I prayed, “Lord, this sounds bad, but I need for You to show me that You love me. I can’t convince myself of it, I need You to make it blatantly obvious that You love me, because I can’t keep this up if I don’t have Your love. I can’t keep going and telling others about Your love if I don’t really believe in it.”
I realize that’s a strange prayer, but it was totally worth it.
Throughout the next few weeks in Ireland, He overwhelmed me with His love. Through the people we met, the ministry, the beauty we got to see in His creation around Ireland, little blessings that would only mean something to me– He just poured His love out on me. I saw and felt His love in ways I never had before, and He just began to fill in the gaps in my heart. The Lord rebuilt the foundation of my identity, with Him as the cornerstone. “Finally,” I thought, “now I can be completely healed and fixed!”
Not quite yet.
Throughout the next few weeks and months, I tried to get better. The Lord would reveal another way that insecurity ruled my life, and I would try and fix it. I tried to “take each thought captive” and get rid of it. But I couldn’t do it. Nothing seemed to be getting better. He was revealing all these lies I had believed of myself, but I couldn’t seem to get rid of them. The more I tried, the more I felt like a failure because I couldn’t pull myself out of it. I just focused on myself more and more and more, as I was trying to “get better”. I would have ups and downs where I would think, “Finally– progress!” and then something would happen that would crush me, and show me how much I still relied on everyone else around me to dictate my moods and attitude. I wasn’t getting any better at all, no matter how hard I tried.**
**Key Phrase: I tried.
Let’s revisit Jeremiah 17: 5&6– “This is what the Lord says: ‘Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans, who rely on human strength and turn their hearts away from the Lord. They are like stunted shrubs in the desert, with no hope for the future. They will live in the barren wilderness, in an uninhabited salty land.'”
Once again, I was that stunted shrub in the desert. Only this time, my own strength became my idol. I wanted to fix myself, and I couldn’t do it. Instead of turning to Him, I relied on myself– my wisdom, my will to change. But that just turned my focus more and more inward.
Isaiah 30:18 says, “So the Lord must wait for you to come to Him so He can show you His love and compassion. For the Lord is a faithful God. Blessed are those who wait for His help.”
It is only in focusing on the glory of the Lord that we are truly changed. Once again, it’s all about His glory. I had to lay it all before Him, confess my idolatry again, and just beg Him to make the change in me. This time, I would turn outwards, turn my focus to Him, and let that be my motivation for change. When a thought or lie from the enemy pops up, all I can do is confess it to Him and ask Him to change it. And He will. Because the Holy Spirit produces love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He will produce these things in our lives. He is the one who is able to change our heart and minds. When we do it ourselves, we just focus inward– either we feel like a failure because we can’t change it, or we become boastful of our own strength because we were able to change ourselves. Either way, the focus is on ourselves, and not on the glory of the Lord.
P.S. This is not a quick fix. He showed me a lot of this over about a three day period about a month ago, and I have to basically remind myself of it on a daily basis. I fail a lot. But when the focus is on Him, it takes some of the pressure off of me. I can rest in His grace and forgiveness, and just try again to give each day to Him. To live every day for His glory, rather than trying to fix myself every day (because let’s face it, the motivation behind that is just to get people to like me more, as a “confident” person.)
Jeremiah 17: 7&8– “But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence. They are like trees planted along a river bank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of draught. Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit.”
