The Living Landscape of Insecurity Part I

You are sitting on the back porch of a cottage.

A lush hill rolls away and up into the Colorado Rockies.
The vanilla Ponderosa scent wafts in with the momentum of the treeline and swirls with the pancakes being flipped in the kitchen.
Aunt Jemima stayed home.
You’re bringing out the real stuff that you paid $8.99 for in an amount that made you wonder if it had crushed diamonds in it.
Oh well.
You and your cup of hazelnut infused bliss have escaped.
You take a sip thinking about just how far beyond the clouds the covered peak ascends.
The breeze strokes the long bladed grass.
Stillness.
A moose wrestles breakfast leaves from a tree off in the distance.
You take another sip.

Zap!

That’s your confidence. It’s quiet, calm, and without fear. It’s a picture of what you carry when there’s absolutely no doubt in your mind that you’ve got what it takes.

…but don’t we all have our deserts?

Blinding sand and beating sun that convince us that the task is trackless.

Insecurity.

Pervasive to speech and action coloring the landscape of who we think we are, but not who we were meant to be.

Stages. Pages. Work. School. The desert slips in and out of the cottage scene like a local television broadcast with poor reception.

And it peppers our tongue.

Insecure about your intelligence?

You may then find that intelligence is the fulcrum of your speech.
That is, you may speak careful not to insult, or precisely to do so.

Insecure about your body?

You may then find that the subject of beauty is the fulcrum of your speech.
That is, you may graciously compliment, or ruthlessly measure.

It’s fight or flight in a different wrapper, but it’s the same bubble gum.
Same choices. Desert or cottage. To bless or to curse.

 

It’s all about response.
Are we speaking from a place of insecurity, or from a place of confidence?
Are we responding to an insecure place within ourselves, or are we responding from a stable, anxiety-free, and fearless place within our God?

Where is your confidence?

And the tragedy of our default language is to believe that others carry the same insecurities that we do. This is why that when we speak from a place of insecurity we pepper our speech with apology and confession for whatever holes within our hull we have allowed to trespass.

But speaking confidently is different.
It is speaking from a place fully understanding that the words will land and will land well.

It’s believing that we are intelligent, or beautiful, or a million other things that humans have found themselves to strive against, and in the end realizing that God is sufficient for any and every shortcoming.

That He is faithful to be leant upon for whatever we lack.

That in every place where I feel stupid for not figuring out a mess of code, or a character in a story, or even a blog post  – I have unlimited access to Him who has the answer to every problem.

Or the deeper issue…
That my value does not rest on what I can figure out, but on the nature of God.

And it is prayer that helps us realize our value because it is the care of God that places value on our lives.
And those who know they are valuable are confident.
And the confident do not waste words constantly testing the scales to see whether they are ‘fill-in-the-blank’ or not, but who are actively investing words in others.

And these….these are the free ones.

#inthirds
So what do you think? Do you think this is garbage? Spot on? How do you feel insecurity colors the way we speak? How has prayer helped you believe truth to combat your own insecurities? Testify in the comments!

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The Living Landscape of Insecurity Part II >>