I struggled with insecurity in high school for awhile until toward the end of my senior year I grew confident. At least I thought I did. I now see it wasn't really confidence; it was me finally growing comfortable. Everyone I went to high school with knew me fairly well by my senior year, and I no longer cared what they thought about me. I was comfortable in my identity as the Christian girl around my high school friends, and I mistook that as confidence. This is my first post of 2019 because I have spent this month focused on Jesus, allowing Him to teach me so I can better teach my readers. This all started with a Mike Todd sermon, so I'll just tell the story.
Pastor Mike leads Transformation Church in Oklahoma, and until I watched this sermon, I did not know anything about him or his church. As I listened to Sadie Robertson speak on YouTube, there was a sermon on my Recommended Videos by Mike Todd. I felt led to listen to it, so I clicked on it. He began to talk about singleness and then preached from Genesis on the first relationship ever to exist and what God did before He gave Eve to Adam. His message held so much truth, but when he said this I knew it was for me, "the Bible says to love others as we love ourselves, but how can we practically love other people if we don't actually love ourselves?"
That hit me like a train. I realized I wasn't really loving myself. I was comparing myself to every girl on UT's campus, I was wearing hats to keep people from seeing my forehead breakouts, I lived in fear that my new friends would someday turn on me, and I never spoke in class in fear of what others thought of me. I couldn't believe it. Was I not the same girl who months earlier had wrote an article on confidence for Odyssey that blew up and was promoted by Odyssey themselves?
My mom bought me a new Bible study for Christmas, and I started it the day after I listened to Pastor Mike's sermon. Just so you would have it, it was a study on breaking free from anything keeping you from living in the freedom you have in Christ. In the Intro, it spoke of bondage and the worst type of slave (someone who doesn't even know they are one). That was me! I was that slave!
I realized that unless it was just God's Will, I probably would not be freed from this overnight and that it would take some effort from me. I deleted my social media apps for two weeks, posted sticky notes all over my mirror each with a different verse on identity, and I took a break from writing. This time was filled with so much vulnerability and layers being peeled back so God could show me how deep my insecurity had really gotten. I actually ended up crying to my mom over my forehead breakouts and weight gain of five pounds since the beginning of college (you couldn't notice either of them) and said to her, "You don't see the girls I go to school with they look like they're twenty-five and I look twelve!"
It was so difficult saying those things out loud because it exposed my weakness, but I was never going be free from the problem until I saw how crippling the problem was. See, I was comfortable with my high school classmates, but I was not even close to that with my college ones. I know I cannot be the only girl who struggles with this, but ladies, we do not have to. The enemy wants us to think that comparison and insecurity is just part of being a girl, but it doesn't have to be and really shouldn't be! We are born again, daughters of the King!
The final step I took towards freedom was possibly a funny one. I love when my hair is short; it is easy to deal with, it's different, and it's fun. It's just more me.
I let it grow long because everyone else seemed to like it more that way, and I even said to myself, "I want to cut my hair so bad, but people may not think I'm pretty anymore after I cut it." As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I felt convicted of pride. I cared so much about others' opinions that I wasn't wearing my hair the way I wanted. I immediately had my mom (yes my mom) set up an appointment with my hair stylist, and that weekend it was cut. I told my mom as soon as I heard the first "snip," I let that signify Christ cutting off my low self esteem.
I'm not here to tell you that I don't still sometimes battle Satan trying to bring me down anymore, but I will tell you that searching and memorizing Scripture played a big role. I will tell you spending more time in prayer and less time on social media seeing everyone's fabricated lives helped. I will tell you that embracing who God made me to be instead of who the world wants me to be was a big factor.
The last time I wrote about self worth, I made it sound easy to be confident. That's because growing comfortable is easy; it happens with time. True, God-found confidence, however, is found in Christ and Him alone. Your journey may not look identical to mine, you may even get set free instantly. The end result will be the same, though, and we will come out stronger believers than before. You are not alone in seeing yourself as someone else other than who you are in Christ: we all struggle to a degree. Let's just all decide here to leave it at the foot of the cross and find life more abundantly.
