About the author : Antwuan Malone
Antwuan Malone is a Ministry Director at ELEVATE Young Adult Ministry (elevateministry.net) where empowers young adults toward Christian leadership. He is passionate about seeing young adults take their place in church history by drawing near enough to God to hear his call on their life, and courageously living in obedience to that call.
How to Kick Insecurity in the… Well, You Know
Do You ‘Do You’?
Like most people, I’m insecure. Maybe even a little more insecure than most. I attribute to the whole (wanna-be) artist thing. Singers, guitar players, painters, writers, thespians, we’re all basket cases worrying about how the guts we pour out of ourselves will be received.
Yes, our guts.
That’s what our products are… guts. Poured on canvas, sung into the air, or written on virtual parchment for the world to behold, criticize, or worst of all… ignore. Don’t let the confidence and bravado you think you see in artists sitting behind their Macbooks fool you for one second. Most of us are insecurity-in-motion. But artists aren’t alone in the insecurity boat.
Many people, non-mac-user people, testify to the same feelings of insecurity. Feelings of inadequacy and fears of being unappreciated or misunderstood, or even completely looked over, run through most of our minds. It doesn’t have to be art. It could be our jobs, our parenting, how we treat our spouses and significant others. It could be any number of things.
I think all of our insecurities come when we fail to embrace who we are. Or better, God made us to be.
I don’t think a little insecurity and need for validation is a bad thing. Makes perfect sense to me, actually. Without at least a bit of insecurity, where would the desire to find a God who created us to relate with Him come from?
To use the ridiculously clichéd statement from an old nineties movie, God “completes us.” But we’d never know how incomplete we are without God. How he’s places God-sized holes in us. We’ d satisfy too quickly. Insecurity and other forms of fear remind us of sin in the world. Of the sin inside us. Perhaps most important, they signal a sort of disharmony in both. We witness a world broken into pieces. We realize a brokenness inside ourselves. And we feel a distant surreal yearning for it all, the world and ourselves, to be put together again.
The insecurities aren’t the problem. It’s what we do with the insecurities.
God made each of us for a purpose. He equipped us with personalities and potentials to achieve that purpose. But far too often we miss it. We’re too busy emulating someone else, or listening to some traditional propaganda about the way we should live, work and play. We end up missing the point. The point of Life. The point of our existence.
Could it be that we are insecure because we are square pegs trying to jam ourselves into round, triangular and other multi-polygonal holes?
Yeah, I’d say so.
In the end, when we talk to God about what happened in our lives here on Earth, I think he’s gonna want to know, “Why didn’t you just do you?” Because He made you to “do you.” Not to conform to some weird or popular notion of what to do. I’m not suggesting people follow their own selfish whims. Not at all. In order to know “you,” you must know God.
God is not gonna judge your life by the purposes set for my life, or the life of your neighbor, mentor, or pastor. He’s got specific things He put you here to do. Are you doing them? If not, maybe that is the source of your insecurity and anxiety. Maybe finding your Godly purpose and living it out can free you… Imagine that, true freedom.
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