Finding your confidence in God.
There was once a good while where I made people call me “The Kite Master.”
Had I flown a lot of kites? No.
Had I flown a kite for a long time? Nope.
Had I flown anything up in the air for longer than 10 seconds within, let’s say, a month of this moment in time? Nah.
But I had the confidence for it and I succeeded. That day I flew a kite and later that year I became the owner of a kite shop.
Sorry, not an actual shop, one that goes in a Christmas village.
The point is, it’s important to find your confidence. Let’s talk about where that starts.
We have a lot of opportunities to fill our heads with other people’s lives. I just finished reading the first book in the Little House on the Prairie series and in it Laura writes how her and Mary have never seen two houses next to each other. Fast forward to today and we know intimate details about the inside of someone’s house…whom we’ve never met…across the country. Thanks to our phones and social media we have plenty of images to fill our minds. Images that are oftentimes just the highlight reel of someone’s life. But you know this, you’ve heard this along with a really quippy quote about “highlight reels” already.
You want to know where to start if your confidence has taken a hit. Or if you’re not happy with what you see in the mirror, or how to stop comparing your life/body/hair/skin/clothes to someone else’s. Or maybe you’re not comparing, you’re just wanting to love being you. The good news is, the first step is easy…
Change what you think about.
What are you meditating on? I know we use the word “meditating” a lot when it comes to Bible verses, but you can be meditating on something and it not be a scripture. I’ve caught myself meditating on negative situations with people: what happened, what I would have done differently, what I would have said to really DRIVE HOME A POINT. But it’s not doing me any good. In fact it’s doing me harm because it’s keeping me out of love.
So when it comes to yourself, what do you think about? If you’re only meditating on your flaws, what you look like in comparison to someone else, or where you have failed in life STOP! That’s not walking in love either! It’s just as much not walking in love as it is to sit around and think about how you’d like to tell off Sister Sandpaper! The Bible tells us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. How can we extend love to someone when we’ve not even worked on how we love ourselves?
“Jesus replied, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” -Matthew 22:37-40 (TPT)
It’s like the facemask in an airplane: you’ve got to first put the facemask on you before you can save others. So in order to fulfill the second greatest commandment, which Jesus points out is equally important as the first, we’ve got to love ourselves.
It’s unrealistic to think you’ll never look at social media again. So instead of swearing it off, take the baby step of paying attention to your thoughts when you’re on it or right after you get off it. Are they positive or negative about yourself? If they’re at all negative, put a stop to them immediately. Say, “that’s not my thought.” Then find a scripture about yourself and the area you need the biggest boost in and speak it out.
I’ll touch more on that next time. But for now, work on identifying what’s going on in your thought life and putting a stop to it.
“But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.” -Jeremiah 17:7
God has put it on my heart to write about this subject. Obviously it’s been a minute since I’ve posted and there is definitely some dust flying around this blog as I type. But I want to share about this because I believe it’s part of my calling. I have such a desire to see women be confident in who God made them to be. I hope you’ll check back in for more. :)
