Encouragement

---

Forget Blooming...Just let me Survive

Once I read in the Saturday paper I was to conduct a seminar with a beauty consultant and a health educator. How did I do that? Better still how do I always get myself into such situations?

Through a previous column, I remember having confessed to the world we ate gravy on our rice, and I hated rice cakes. I even went so far as to mention my love for Snicker Bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups…so much for impressing the health educator.

While I am in this confessing mode, if you had asked for me during the 32 years of teaching school, my students would have agreed on this detailed description:

“She’s the gray headed teacher whose hair needs fixing. She probably doesn’t have on any lipstick and there is chalk dust all over her skirt. Her nails won’t be polished either. Mrs. Buckley never wears high heels, and she won’t have a pretty scarf or animals around her neck.”

Do you think the beauty consultant was impressed with those credentials? You are getting the drift of this situation, aren’t you? They were to talk about blooming and most of the time I struggled to just survive!

To continue with this story, we have to enter the classroom where my students were talking about idioms. “Making mountains out of molehills” was our example of an idiom.

At the conclusion of this discussion when one bright student waved his hand and asked, “Mrs. Buckley, just what is a molehill?” What would you have told him?

I’m not sure what a molehill is, but I do know about mountains. Today we can be convinced one mountain so many of us erect and face is a lack of self-confidence and a poor self-image. As Christians, we should believe a good self-image is a self in step with God and a self confident person lives out the truth of who we are in Christ Jesus.

How does our lack of self-confidence rob God? It writes graffiti all over His name and moves him out onto the margins of our lives. Why do we sell ourselves short and show disrespect for the abilities he has given us?

Maybe it is because we are afraid or just lazy; maybe we can’t bring ourselves to make a decision; maybe we can’t take rejection; or maybe we don’t have what it takes to keep on keeping on.

Let’s become child-like and use our imaginations to listen in on a conversation between Self-Pity and Self-respect:

Self-Pity asks, “Why am I taking up space on this earth?”
Self-Respect answers, “I am aware of my own existence on this earth to bear fruit.”
Self-Pity whines, “I am hopeless, unworthy of a friend or someone to love me.”
Self-Respect announces, “I have God’s wisdom to look beyond every hopeless relationship and task.”

The main difference is Self-Pity takes endless futile inventories of its own failures while Self-Respect acknowledges its weaknesses, gets up and moves on.

Finally, there is good news about this doom and gloom writing. When I met the beauty consultant, she had gray hair… just like me. And it gets better. The health educator was going home to eat Fritos… just like me.

Hopefully, you have been encouraged today to start liking yourself and stop making mountains out of molehills. You start by taking your eyes off yourself and keeping your focus on God. It works for me.

.

---

PLEASE ENCOURAGE AUTHOR BELOW LEAVE COMMENT ON ARTICLE