Failure. Loser. Inadequate. Untalented.
Sound familiar?
If you haven’t heard these words running through your brain at some point in your life – good for you! But if I were a gambling woman, I would bet the majority of the people whose eyes find this page, have. These are words we use to measure how our lives look; or how our careers look; or how our appearance looks. These are words we use to compare ourselves with others.
Those words I used recently to categorize myself after a period in my life didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. My confidence had left and like a broken recording I heard those words but with YOU ARE in front of them. “You are a failure. You are a loser. You are inadequate. You are untalented.” Over and over again until the tears would not fall anymore. And it wasn’t my first rodeo at this party filled with pity. Oh no! I have been to this mantra of woe many times before in my life.
Many of us have determined in our minds we are these things. It particularly hurts when we know in our hearts we were doing what God asked us to do, and it didn’t work out. For me, in my eyes, it was a monsoon of continual, repeated destruction.
Last week I turned the aisle of the grocery store and saw a middle aged woman standing in front of the peanut butter, weeping. I knew why she was sobbing…because I’d been there. If you’ve ever experienced it, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
“Too many choices?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I find the best choices are usually the simplest most obvious answers,” I smiled and pulled the most common of peanut butters off the shelf and put it in her shopping cart.
“I’m not crying over peanut butter,” she responded with her head tucked.
“I know and I’ve been there.”
We sat at Starbucks for about two hours crying over life. If I hadn’t been where she is, I would have never noticed.
Sometimes the failures in our lives, the disappointments, the strike-outs, are the places God needs us to experience in order to reach the places He needs us to be for greatness. At other times, we cannot understand why something so horrific happened in our lives, but we can know, God will use it for good for those who love Him. Our confidence must come from Him, not our situation or the outcome of an event, or the results of a test, but in knowing and loving Him.
Psalm 57:7-8 reads, “My heart, O God, is steadfast, my heart is steadfast; I will sing and make music.
8 Awake, my soul! Awake, harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn.” David wrote these words from a dark place in his life. He wasn’t in the middle of a victory, as it appears. He was actually running for his life.
The next time your mind runs a news ticker like the one on the bottom of your internet screen, “You are a failure. You are a loser…,” rewrite the words. “I am confident in my Creator. I am the child of the King of kings and Lord of lords. I am a winner in Christ.”
