I once worked for an insecure boss. It was awful.
Insecurity seems to be one of the terms de jour of our age to throw around. But if you’ve worked for an insecure person or been in close relationship with an insecure person, it not just a buzz word, it’s a very unpleasant experience nightmare.
Security permeates everything.
My boss had few people he trusted. He controlled ways that information was shared. He was overly cautious about who knew what.
Trust. Information. Control.
The ‘big three’ of insecure people.
The flip side is true. I worked for another man who was secure. He was able to trust me and my coworkers. Information flowed up and down, backwards and forwards. As long as we were all on the loop in a timely fashion, we weren’t afraid that we might offend or overstep or understep or screw up in some unanticipated way. And his security provided a generous work environment. Dare I say … it was fun!
Security permeates everything.
But sometimes we are the insecure person. Who wants to be the person questioning where they stand in a relationship? Or how what you are saying is going to be taken? Or if people will like you?
Recently I attended a writer’s conference where I knew a few people from on-line, but the truth was that I didn’t really know anyone. Walking into the main room, I felt like a junior higher. Truth be told, I felt worse than a junior higher because I loved junior high. Would anyone want to talk to me? Would they think my ideas were stupid? Would I be ‘cool’?
I hate feeling reduced to less than I am! Especially when it is by the whisperings from within myself.
The root of security is identity. But you can know who you are and instead choose to listen to the whisperings.
I don’t see myself as a real, real writer. Not like an author who has written, say, 15 books. See, if I set the bar high enough, I’ll never measure up. But if I set bar at: I am a writer who touches people through my writings (and take publishing off the table), well now, by that standard, I am a writer.
The whisperings. We all have them. In the movie A Beautiful Mind there is a pivotal scene when the main character realizes a little girl and man he talked with and did life with were not “real.” He never stopped seeing them, but he stopped engaging them.
You are going to have whisperings this side of Eden, the challenge is, which ones are you going to engage and which are you going to ignore? Secure people engage the truth and insecure people engage the whisperings masquerading as truth. For now, we have to make choice.
But in Eden Regained, there will be no masquerading and every last one of us will be wholly and fully secure in who we are.
If I could do a backflip, picture me right now tumbling around at this reminder!
All the posts in the series will be added to this page each day of October. You can subscribe now by entering your email where it says “Jump into the Mess.” Can you believe it, only one more reminder? Amy
Remember:Love, satisfaction, extravagance, freedom, belonging, recreation, truth, trust, purity, submission and power, unity, kindness, blameless, with abandon, acceptance, celebration, faith, generosity, joy, purpose, empathy, rhythms, hope, elation, esteem, healthy, peace, security. (Yup, still have the formatting problem :))
If we’d just measure ourselves by the cross bar on which Jesus’ hands were nailed we’d have so much more joy in who He is and who He has made us to be!