Column from 2010

What is the goal?  Is it to be comfortable in your own skin?  Is it to have confidence that people can admire?  Is it to be sure of the fact that you are a good person?  These are questions that I ask myself.  I am pretty sure you have asked yourself some of them as well.  As we grow up we are constantly tweaking ourselves to end up being the person that we want to be.  Most of the time we don't even know who that person is that we want to end up like.  Who do we want to be known as?  Is it the "cool" person, the "funny person", the "intelligent" person?  Music is a perfect example.  Many people decide that they are not going to like a certain kind of music because what it says about them regardless if it sounds good to their ears.  What about the clothes that we wear?  Do we really think that they look good on us?  Do we wear them because they make us look better and fit us the right way?  Or do we wear them because of what the clothes are saying about us?     (Read more after the jump.)


It is unbelievable the road we take to end up in the land of security.  We want to feel good about ourselves so bad. It's hilarious to look at things we do to make us seem secure. There are so many signs that point directly to our insecurities.  Arrogance, aggression and an inferiority complex show that we want something for ourselves but we don't know how to get it.  We don't have it but we don't want anyone to know that we don't.  That's why we act like we have it all together.  Lisa Edmonson said "He who is humble is confident and wise.  He who brags is insecure and lacking."  I know this to be true because I have wrestled with this my whole life.  It comes with my personality.  It took me a long time to finally admit to myself that I love attention.  When people laughed at me it made me feel good about myself.  When people didn't laugh at me it hurt my ego and made me try harder. 

It started making a little more sense to me after my basketball skills started to leave me.  Through out all of college I was known as a basketball player.  Actually I was probably known as a "cocky" basketball player.  If there was one thing that I was confident about is that I was good at basketball (in Seventh Day Adventist circles.)  When my basketball skills went from "the guy who is good and never passes the dang ball" to "the guy who is mediocre and never passes the dang ball" I wanted to be known for something else.  Basketball is what really characterized who I was.  I looked at myself the same off the court as on the court.  And when I lost more then I wanted to I didn't want to think of myself as a loser. 

This all sounds really self centered.  That's because it is.  I am a self centered person.  I think we all are.  That is why we have insecurities. Nobody else besides you cares about your insecurities.  Why?  Because they care about their own.  We think about ourselves and care about ourselves more then anyone on the planet. We consider other people cool if they like the same things we like, talk the same way that we do, and of course they have to think we are cool.  When you think about it the people that you like the most are those people that like and appreciate you.  Everybody wants to hang out with someone who likes them and makes them feel validated on the person that they are. 

As I am sitting here trying to think of a way to not be insecure I can only come up with one answer.  Be a Christian.  What does that mean?  When I think about being a christian I don't think about tithe.  I don't think about living a healthy lifestyle.  I don't think about when you worship or how you worship.  What I do think about is how you treat people.  How you love people.  They will know we are Christians by our love.  What if we stepped outside of ourselves and realize that nobody is thinking about us more then we are? Maybe then we could figure out a way to think of ourselves less and others more.  If we think about ourselves less our insecurities and the things that we are not good at wont bother us as much.   I know that it is hard for me.  Maybe if we worried about how we look less and cared for others more then God would reveal to us the special talents and gifts that he has given us and we could use them for his glory.