So Long Insecurity
Page 5
Their conflict goes to show that monumentally foolish decisions can catapult you into insecurities you might have lived the rest of your life without. You can be sure we’ll hear more on that subject later. After years of trying to conceive a child with Abram, Sarai came up with the bright idea to hand over her young maidservant, Hagar, to him in hopes of producing an heir. Can you spell I-D-I-O-T? I know, I know. It was a different culture, but no matter what the local mores are, there’s something inside every woman that says it’s wrong to share her man. Then again, desperation opens the door of insecurity with the gentility of a wrecking ball. Genesis 16:4-6 tells us what happened next.
He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my servant in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the LORD judge between you and me.”
“Your servant is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.
Nothing makes a woman battle insecurity more than feeling like she can’t give her guy what he wants. Nothing except handing him another woman, that is. I need you to chase a rabbit with me for a moment. Do you know that recently someone tried to convince me of the marital benefits of swinging? (I don’t mean the kind of swinging first graders do on the playground.) Rumors of swingers have circulated for years around the cul-de-sacs in our family-friendly suburb. I have no idea if they’re true, and Lord knows I don’t want to know. Nevertheless, here’s the argument I heard: “You can stay married to one partner, yet [hesitation while searching for the right word] sleep with others in a mutually agreed-upon situation.” Blood pressure rising. Trying to stay in control of my volume. Are you out of your ever-loving mind? Sorry, buddy, but that’s not what most people call staying married.
It simply cannot work. No couple on earth can maintain emotional intimacy with one another while they have sexual intimacy with other partners. Our bodies, souls, and spirits are far too intricately woven. Eventually hearts follow bodies, and bodies follow hearts. Thank God, most couples aren’t crazy enough to think swinging would help, although plenty of marriages are crushed by unfaithfulness. I am absolutely convinced that couples can be restored by God after betrayal and infidelity if both the husband and the wife are willing to do the hard and long work—but not until relations of every sort have been completely cut off from the third party. (And even then it’s a miracle. But thank God He does indeed perform miracles. I’ve seen the evidence in more marriages than I can count.)
These examples may seem worlds apart from Sarai and Hagar, but in reality, the only difference is the goal. The carnage is all too similar. Any time a third party enters the intimacy of marriage, someone is eventually going to get thrown out. And even though it wasn’t Sarai, the experience nearly skinned her alive. Glance back at that Scripture segment for a moment and notice that Hagar despised Sarai and Sarai mistreated Hagar. We naturally despise people whose company we are forced to share if we feel largely threatened by them.
Threat. That single word captures one of the most powerful drivers of insecurity. More often than not, if we’re willing to make the connection, we can trace feelings of insecurity to a perceived threat, especially when it comes in a sudden rush.
What are we afraid of?
Who are we afraid of?
What are we afraid of losing?
Why are we afraid of being displaced?
Studies have long since proven that much of what we fear is fueled by our imaginations, and in fact, most of what we fear never even happens. However, as we seek healing for our insecurity, it does us absolutely no good to work from the premise that we have nothing to be insecure about. Sometimes our fears are founded. Sometimes a valid threat really does arise. What happens then? Not long ago a woman wrote me a letter describing how her best friend systematically seduced her husband. That, girlfriend, is a threat. My suggestion is this: even when fears are founded and threats are real and we are about to be swept away in a tidal wave of well-earned insecurity, there is divine power, wisdom, and clarity of thought to be found. The person who responds with strength instead of hysteria at a time like that may be a stranger to you right now, but finding that person is precisely what we are doing here.
If you can’t find resolution when faced with a persistent threat, bad feelings can quickly turn into bad behavior, and somebody’s going to get mistreated. Take Sarai or Hagar, for instance. Neither one of them had what they wanted. The mistress would never hold the esteem of the wife, and the wife would never be the surrogate heir’s real mother. Hence, Hagar despised Sarai, and Sarai mistreated Hagar. No emotion is uglier than jealousy, and you can jot this one down in bold print: jealousy is always the result of a perceived threat. And a threat always places a 911 call to insecurity.
Oh, but I can one-up Sarai and Hagar. In the entire canon of Scripture, no competition among women compares to the one recorded in Genesis 29 and 30, in which a man with more than one woman has inadvertently signed himself up for more than double his share of turmoil. Jacob had two wives. Worse yet, they were sisters, and Jacob didn’t love Leah. He loved Rachel, but her sister, Leah, was a baby-making machine in a culture that placed a high premium on baby making. Each of Leah’s sons and her maidservant’s sons bore the mark of her insecurities by receiving names that reflected her emotional state at their births. Here are just a few:
• Reuben: “The Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.”
• Simeon: “Because the Lord has heard that I am not loved, he gave me this one too.”
• Levi: “Now at last my husband will become attached to me.” (She’d given up on love. Now she’d just settle for an attachment. Pathetic. Let’s avoid that, sister.)
And those were only the first few sons. In the ancient world, names were often given to the infant on the seventh day. Imagine what our children might have been named if we had chosen something that reflected our postpartum frame of mind.
A name meaning “I guess I’ll never sleep again”?
Or “Fetch that man so I can flail him”?
Or “I’ve never been in so much pain in all my life”?
Or “Where in the world is my mother when I need her”?
Or “She’s not as cute as her big brother was”?
Or just something short and sweet like “Hemorrhoid”?
It would be awful, just as it had to have been for those two sisters. Leah needed counseling. Rachel needed to go with her.
When Rachel saw that she was not bearing Jacob any children, she became jealous of her sister. So she said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I’ll die!” Jacob became angry with her and said, “Am I in the place of God, who has kept you from having children?”
Genesis 30:1-2
Nothing like thinking God doesn’t like you as well as He likes someone else to make you a smidge insecure. This was only the beginning of Rachel’s madness. Before all was said and done, she’d dragged her maidservant into the middle of it, and all her sons’ names were emotionally regurgitated too. That’s why I’m co-awarding Leah and Rachel with the Most Insecure Women in the Word Award. They earned it. And they might as well share it. After all, they shared Jacob.
I’m ready to turn the spotlight on some men, lest we think insecurity is only a woman’s battle. So let’s pick on Moses. After encountering the fiery, self-existent God of heaven and earth—the great I Am—then being used by Him to turn a staff into a snake and a diseased hand into healthy flesh, and then being commissioned by Him to proclaim deliverance, Moses offered this retort: “O Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant.” (Translation? Nothing has even changed since You showed up. Same old, same old.) “I am slow of speech and tongue.”
So the Lord said, “I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”
Yep. That’s some insecurity. Heaven knows how many people never fulfill their destinies simply because of their own insecurities. God finally gave in to Moses’ request to have someone else talk for him, but lo and behold, Aaron was the very person who offered to fire up a golden calf from the wanderers’ jewelry (“I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”) so the Israelites would have something to worship while Moses was delayed. The kind of insecurity that makes us reluctant to believe and obey God not only leads us into sin, it also ends up dragging a few other people into it with us.
But now, for my selection for the Most Insecure Man in the Word Award. No one was the king of insecurity like the first crown of Israel. You can’t fully appreciate his earnings without knowing that Scripture introduces Saul as “an impressive young man without equal among the Israelites—a head taller than any of the others” (1 Samuel 9:2). He’s exhibit A for dispelling the theory that impressive people must be inwardly secure. When the people of Israel tried to coronate Big Boy, they couldn’t find him anywhere. I love this part:
When they looked for him, he was not to be found. So they inquired further of the LORD, “Has the man come here yet?”
And the LORD said, “Yes, he has hidden himself among the baggage.”
1 Samuel 10:21-22
Insecurity’s expertise is hiding its victim in some baggage. I know that from personal experience. Believe me when I say that God has had more than a few occasions to say of me, “Yes, she has hidden herself among the baggage.” Some months ago I flipped on the television and took in an Oprah show on record setters. One woman held the world record for the shortest length of time it has ever taken anybody to zip herself up in a suitcase. Nine seconds. What I wanted to know was this: whatever made her say to herself the very first time, I believe I’ll zip myself up in a suitcase? If I were a betting woman, I’d put my money on family. But back to Saul.
They ran and brought him out, and as he stood among the people he was a head taller than any of the others.
1 Samuel 10:23
Scripture had already acclaimed Saul’s stature, so why bother telling us again? I think God wanted to make sure we knew He had ancient Israel’s Baby Huey on His hands. If you want to see an insecure person make an idiot of himself, put him in a leadership position, stick a very talented and together up-and-comer right next to him, and then stand back and watch. Talk about threatening! Here’s what threw a teetering Saul right over the edge:
Whatever Saul sent him to do, David did it so successfully that Saul gave him a high rank in the army. This pleased all the people, and Saul’s officers as well. When the men were returning home after David had killed the Philistine, the women came out from all the towns of Israel to meet King Saul with singing and dancing, with joyful songs and with tambourines and lutes. As they danced, they sang: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” Saul was very angry; this refrain galled him. “They have credited David with tens of thousands,” he thought, “but me with only thousands. What more can he get but the kingdom?” And from that time on Saul kept a jealous eye on David.
1 Samuel 18:5-9
Insecurity lives in constant terror of loss. Insecure people are always afraid that something or somebody is going to be taken from them. Saul feared the loss of power and admiration, and he quickly ascertained that David would be the one to try to take them from him. He didn’t quite get that God alone was in charge of his destiny and the only one who could jar that crown off his head. Saul sloshed fuel on the fire of his jealousy until he developed such an obsession with David that he lost his gourd.
One thing that might have driven Saul to such distraction was that his feelings were so conflicted. Did you notice in the segment above that Saul was the very one who promoted David? I’d like to suggest the probability that he liked David and despised him at the same time. That’s not an uncommon response toward people we admire but who also make us feel threatened and insecure. We’re not jealous of people in whom we see nothing admirable. In fact, it is the fear that they have something we don’t that makes us most insecure.
We’ve all felt insecure over somebody else’s success. But that’s not why I am giving Saul the Most Insecure Man in the Word Award. He won because he let his emotions get so out of control that his insecurity morphed into complete instability. It happens. Interestingly, Saul had moments of emotional sobriety when he knew how far left he’d gone and even wept with regret over his actions toward David. Nevertheless, he refused to call out to God for deliverance from his own unhealthy emotions, and before the dust of regret settled, Saul wanted the source of his threat dead. That’s the kind of thing that can land you in prison.
I just want to whisper something to you in the safety of this environment while no one else is listening: by the time you wish something bad would happen to the person who makes you feel insecure, you need urgent care. Sometimes we need an outside voice to say, “You’re spinning out of control here. Let somebody help you reel that thing in.”
These examples are just a touch of that familiar insecurity from the fingerprints on the pages of the Old Testament. The New Testament would offer us no fewer picks, but with the point made, I’ll just hit a few highlights. How about when the disciples picked the inopportune time of the Last Supper to get into a fight over which one of them was considered to be the greatest? The need to be considered the greatest is always rooted in the gnawing fear that we’re not. Unrelenting self-promotion always carries the lingering scent of insecurity.
Or how about the woman at the well in the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel? If marrying five losers and living with number six isn’t a waving red flag with the letters I-N-S-E-C-U-R-I-T-Y appliquéd on it, one doesn’t exist.
And then there’s Paul. I love the apostle Paul. Honestly, he’s one of my favorite people in the entire stretch of Scripture, but maybe one reason he appeals to me so much is because he was enormously used of God in spite of himself. Don’t think for a moment he didn’t fight his own flesh just like the rest of us. Take, for instance, the way he felt the need to affirm his credentials to the people he served in Corinth by using this little twist:
I do not think I am in the least inferior to those “super-apostles.” I may not be a trained speaker, but I do have knowledge.
2 Corinthians 11:5-6
Tell me that’s not insecurity. If you’re not convinced, take a look at what blurted from his pen only a chapter later:
I have made a fool of myself, but you drove me to it. I ought to have been commended by you, for I am not in the least inferior to the “super-apostles,” even though I am nothing.
2 Corinthians 12:11
Do you think just maybe he protests too much? In all probability, he fought the awful feeling that he wasn’t as good as the others who hadn’t done nearly so much wrong. I totally grasp that. At the same time, Paul also battled a big, fat ego. He was a complex mound of clay just like the rest of us, belittling and boasting in himself in a dizzying psychological zigzag. The beauty of Paul wasn’t his superhumanity but his unwillingness to let his weaknesses, feelings, and fears override his faith. Like us, the fiercest enemy he had to fight in the fulfillment of his destiny was himself.
To Paul, the essence of the crucified life was daily dying to the part of himself that would deny, destroy, or distract from the great work of God in him. The great work of God through him. After untold wars with his own inner man, Paul watched as his wounded ego was wrestled to the ground by the Spirit of Christ, and up stood a person he had no inkling he could be. A stranger, you might say, to the man he’d mirrored for so long. “By the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10). And his mission was accomplished.
The fact that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit on the pages of Scripture is not dampened by the insecurities of those God chose to pen it is perhaps the greatest testimony to its incomparable potency. After th
e likes of Adam, Eve, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Leah, Rachel, Saul, the woman at the well, the super-apostles, and Paul, surely we can breathe a sigh of relief that we are not alone in our struggles. Human flesh and blood have no weakness so strong that God’s strength is made weak. He’s got what we need. It’s up to us whether or not we’re going to let the worst of us get the best of us.
May the LORD answer you when you are in trouble; may the God of Jacob make you secure!
Psalm 20:1, NET
Chapter 5
Rooting It Out
That was then. This is now. Where on earth is all our insecurity coming from? And what makes some people struggle with it so much more than others? We’re going to sit down in the dirt for a little while and dig down deep until we discover some roots. If you’ve dealt with insecurity much of your life like I have, you’ve surely wondered where you picked it up or if you managed to come out of the womb with it like a giant invisible birthmark.
You’ve probably also marveled at a few people along the way who don’t seem to give insecurity the slightest shrug. Of course, you and I don’t tend to befriend them. After all, they’d make us feel even more insecure, but we can admit that we’re baffled by them. What makes some people decidedly less susceptible than others? And how could so many of us with a hundred things going for us be so pitifully rattled by this one persistent thing?
Let’s go ahead and unload ourselves of considerable culpability: the only thing it takes to develop insecurity is to be born human and raised on planet Earth. We live in the information age. We wake up to a dozen news-breaking reasons to feel the ground quaking beneath our feet. Practically every morning while I’m leaned over the sink toward the bathroom mirror, putting on my mascara, Keith sits on the edge of the tub and reads me excerpts out of the Houston Chronicle. It’s far more interesting than reading it for myself because Keith provides his own very colorful editorials, for which he often gets chided to watch his mouth. Still, I keep listening. At times he’ll read silently and then blurt out some kind of slang that tells me he’s totally disgusted. It piques my curiosity every time.