What a word. Everywhere we look today we see billboards imploring us to feel and look confident, we constantly hear from the media how we are to be strong, dominant, and aggressive in order to be perceived as confident, and in fact, in resumés, this keyword is one of the most frequently used self-decriptors. For who wants to appear that they have a lack of confidence? You would never see as the opening line in a cover letter "My name is so-and-so, I am the VP of a very successful company, have consistently achieved above average results, I am dependable, reliable, but I have confidence issues". No way! We all want to appear like we have it together, even though many of us, myself included still don't have a decent grasp on what true confidence is.
I've been thinking a lot about this issue lately, and it has been coming up in many different forms, through conversations with friends and things I've been reading. A question was posed to me by a good friend a couple of weeks ago, and at the time, I had no good answer. She mentioned to me that her confidence, the confidence that seemed so strong in her younger years, had simply evaporated in recent years. She asked me how we, as twenty-somethings, could regain this confidence. I, coincidentally, had been feeling this exact same thing. We lamented about the loss of our "boldness", our feelings of inadequacy, and our total inability to be assertive and blunt like we had been when we were younger.
After thinking about this more, I came to a very interesting conclusion. At first, I thought, Gee, I miss this confidence. It enabled me to say and do things without regard to how it would be perceived. It enabled me to go places and do things that others thought crazy. It allowed me to speak my mind, and to not worry about the reception. When I first started thinking about this, I will admit, I quietly mourned those days. Any friend of mine (especially older friends) would likely testify that I have been a very direct, forward, un-shy person who will absolutely not stay away from sharing my opinion. While this is true about my younger self, my older self has a certain aversion to these qualities. As I pondered this, something hit me like a ton of bricks.
In the Bible, there is a story about two men who each build a house. As I'm sure you know, one builds his house on the soft sand, and the other builds his house on the rock. When storms come barreling towards the two homes, of course, the one who built his house on the rock still has a house, however battered, at the end of the day. The foolish man, however, whose house was built on the sand has nothing but bits of plywood and nails to show for it (PS, this is the Whitney translation... if you'd like the original version, you can find it in Matthew 7.) The moral here is that I used to think this story referred ONLY to the message of salvation. Follow Jesus, and your house will stand, don't and it will collapse. As I think more about this, though, I have begun to see how this story is applicable in so many areas of life.
One such area is this exact topic. Confidence. The confidence I mourned, the confidence of my younger years is just that, an immature, young confidence. As I have thought more about it, I really delved deep into where this so-called confidence came from. What I found was a very ugly portrayal of my deepest sins. The "confidence" I had was based on judgment, hypocrisy, and on my OWN understanding of the world and the things in it. I was confident, alright, but I was confident for the wrong reasons. I would look at someone else and start to mentally pick them apart. I would hear someone's accomplishments, and instead of congratulating them, I would try to one-up them. I would see someone's achievements and goals and I would push myself to the absolute brink to beat them and to achieve better results. Of course I felt great on the surface. People congratulated me for my awards, I had immense pride in my abilities. But, you know what they say... pride comes before the fall.
Somehow, as I've grown older, I have realized that I was like the foolish man who built his house on the sand. I had built my confidence entirely on two very shaky principles. The first, and most dangerous, was my own self-understanding. I had a go-getter attitude that told me that I could handle my own issues myself. The second problem was that I used other people to feel good about myself. Maybe not directly, but certainly mentally. This instilled in me an immense bitterness toward others, a tendency to belittle or make light of others' opinions and wreaked and is still wreaking havoc on my relationships.
For a long time, I identified these negative qualities in myself, but had no idea where the root was. In realizing these issues and dealing with them, I always said to myself "at least you still have confidence". What the Lord has been teaching me so much lately, though, is that the more I chip away at the foundation of this immature "confidence", the less secure the confident appearance on top is. It is like an immense rock, balancing on a miniscule pedestal that is threatening to collapse at any moment. I feel less confident at this moment in my life than I ever have. And I think it's healthy. I would rather feel totally unconfident, as long as I am leaning on the Lord, than have all the confidence in the world, leaning on and using other people. It is as simple as that. I have total faith, however, that through my brokenness the Lord will pick up the pieces and instill in me the confidence I desire. If I have pure motivations and intentions, I fully believe that I will be able to gain the right kind of confidence, one built from the ground up, steadily and with intention, rather than the kind of my past - one where I haphazardly constructed the facade of my confidence and worked desperately to support it from the bottom through my own limited abilities.
