by Beth Moore
Why am I bothering to tell you this? Because I want you to know that I’m not one of those Christians with a phobia of everything vaguely enjoyable or superficial. I have no allergy to fun. I like cute clothes and pedicures, and I rarely have fewer than three colors in my hair at any given time. I do not live my believing life with my nose turned up in constant disapproval, nor do I ask every morning what this world’s coming to. But make no mistake, there are a few things I genuinely hold in contempt. One is our culture’s propensity to force our children to grow up too fast. Another sits in tandem beside it: teaching our daughters from the earliest age the high priority of sensuality. It’s what author Cooper Lawrence calls “early hypersexualization” in her book The Cult of Celebrity. To any adult willing to listen, she writes:
It’s not all in your head: There is a difference between celebrity and media images girls see now and what you were exposed to as a child. Highly sexualized images of younger and younger women are becoming the norm.18
That’s why an illicit storefront in a mall with an otherwise family-friendly atmosphere is objectionable to me. As long as a boutique gives the consumer some accurate idea of what’s inside, the responsibility is on our own heads once we walk through the door. Having images forced on our young children through storefronts or even billboards is another matter entirely. It’s a full-throttle shout of twisted values that develop into all sorts of destructive beliefs and behaviors in the accidental buyer. No, I don’t expect advertising to improve, but we’d better start saying a few things to ourselves and our girls at significantly higher volumes.
I’ve watched an unsettling trend develop over the last decade, and I’m convinced that it is the result of this “early hypersexualization.” In previous generations, the girls who were the most insecure and desperate and the least likely to set boundaries and practice self-respect were normally those with a background of sexual abuse or misuse. We were the ones who settled for so much less in our relationships, caved to pressure, felt like we always had to have a boyfriend, and acted like no was all but missing from our list of multiple-choice answers. Over recent years, a growing number of middle and high school girls who have never been inappropriately touched have taken on these same characteristics. After watching the disturbing trend too long to shake it, I finally realized that our whole Western world is under sexual assault. Whether or not a girl is physically touched in sexually inappropriate ways, the visual impact of early hypersexualization is still significant enough to dramatically shape her self-concept and sexuality.
Our world system is shouting no louder lie to its female population than this: To be desirable is to be valuable, and to be sensual is to be secure. These are the attributes that guarantee you will always be loved.
Those buying the lie are getting younger and younger, and the emotional toll is getting higher and higher. This book is built on one major premise: try as we might, we are not likely to change our culture. But we can let God change us, and vital change will happen within our culture. We are surrounded by a superficial world making deceptive claims. That will not soon change. We find ourselves with three basic choices: (1) We can pull out of the world system entirely and isolate ourselves and our families. In this case, we will need a substantial amount of money to buy a remote farm where we’ll need to drill a well and get a septic tank. Forget being light in the darkness. Just go hide it under a bushel of split peas. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not bashing farming. It’s our grocer, for Pete’s sake. I’m bashing hiding. (2) We can immerse ourselves in superficiality and find it utterly insatiable. In this case, we’ll need to make peace with self-loathing, because we will undoubtedly become our own worst enemies. (3) We can fend off the effects of superficiality with a deliberate devotion to the profound. We can fight to find purpose.
As long as we live, our self-absorption and our insecurity will walk together, holding hands and swinging them back and forth like two little girls on their way to a pretend playground they can never find. Human nature dictates that most often we will be as insecure as we are self-absorbed. The best possible way to keep from getting sucked into the superficial, narcissistic mentality that money, possessions, and sensuality can satisfy and secure us is to deliberately give ourselves to something much greater. We are under the constant indoctrination that getting is the way to receiving.
Christ, the Author of life more abundant, taught something totally different. He showed us that giving, rather than getting, is the means to receiving. I will say it again before our journey ends: to find yourself, your true, secure self, you must lose yourself in something larger.
With your permission, I’m going to ask you some probing questions as our road narrows toward a close. What is your passion? Because we’ve been handcrafted in the very image of our Creator, we each have a cavernous need to live a life that matters. What matters to you? As you draw your last breath, what do you want your life to have been about? Don’t feel condemned and shallow if you can’t think of anything meaningful at the moment. Search your heart. Your vision may be buried somewhere beneath the cynicism you developed as a defense. Life is hard, but even the harshness of life points toward purpose. If you’re willing, you can probably trace your passion all the way to the deepest point of your pain.
For many of us, God used painful experiences to birth our life passions. A fire burns in me to see women of all ages and colors freed and flourishing in Christ, because I’ve known the anguish of bondage and abuse. I have a friend who was profoundly affected by abandonment and now pours her life into helping couples adopt. I know of another woman who struggled in school and didn’t get her GED until well into adulthood. She now helps children learn how to read. I know countless addicts freed by God who now live their lives to help others discover the same deliverance. I have so many friends involved in prison ministries because they know what it’s like to feel trapped by terrible decisions. I know a former exotic dancer who gave her life to Christ but through His sanctifying presence kept her love for the innocent and beautiful side of dancing. She now teaches ballet to little girls and has never been happier. They don’t know her past because there is no further trace of it, but those of us who are aware of where she has been are twice as impressed with where she is now. She is a miracle.
Please allow me, for the sake of emphasis, to repeat myself on issues so vital to our journey’s success: you are meant to be a miracle too. Your past has not come full circle to its complete redemption until you allow Christ to not only defuse it, but also to use it. I’m not suggesting that you have to go public with all your sins and sorrows. I’m simply proposing that the only reason God allowed all that pain in your path, as much as He loved you, was to bring good from it. Have you offered Him the freedom to work all those hardships together for good as He promises in His Word to those who love Him and seek to fulfill His purposes?
Beloved, pursuing a life of purpose is one of our strongest guards against buying the superficiality that feeds insecurity. What if we stopped thinking about it and started doing it? If you have no idea where to begin, search out some volunteer opportunities in your area. Look into hospice. Go sit beside a person with AIDS, dying to be loved. Go read to the elderly. People out there need help. And you have something inside you that needs to help them. So do I. It’s the way our souls were built.
Unless we choose to drop out of public life entirely, we’re still going to pass alluring storefronts, billboards, magazine covers, and Internet ads that shout all sorts of promises they can’t keep. Unless we want to let them completely consume and corrode us, we’re going to have to know beyond a doubt that life is about something greater. I am not nearly as affected by plunking a new pair of jeans on the counter at Gap if I know in my heart that it’s the furthest thing on earth from what really matters.
When Keith and I get home from doing food relief work in Angola or AIDS work in South Africa, our fleshly appetites are always dramatically dulled and our insecurities are veritable nonissues. We hav
e much more important things to think about. We’ve both become convinced that the less we are willing to get outside our own lives, the more self-absorbed and miserable we become. I’ll never forget Keith walking through the front door a year or so ago, slamming it behind him, and stomping to the bedroom, where he grabbed his checkbook.
“Honey, what on earth is the matter?” I could tell he was as mad as a hornet.
“I just caught myself counting our money in my head while I was driving around town. Apparently I haven’t given enough away lately.”
And he wrote a check to a charity. Now don’t go thinking that he’s Mr. Hyper-Spiritual, because he’s not. He’s just a man who has lived long enough to know that the more selfish he is, the more miserable he becomes. The greedier he is, the less secure he feels. If he feels like hoarding, he knows he needs to give something away.
With awe and gratefulness to a merciful God, we have watched our children also pour their passions into the needs of people. Yes, both my daughters will shop their feet to nubs, spending the day with me at an area mall where we might end up with more than lunch. But they will also board a plane en route to the remotest parts of the world and stare poverty in its ugly face.
Our youngest daughter, Melissa, wrote these words after her recent return from mission work overseas. Her experience suggests to all of us that a person doesn’t have to wait until she has lived fifty-plus years to figure out that life is not all about her.
Oh, what a deep imprint [the children] have made on this hard heart of mine. And not just them, but all the people, so deeply loved by God, in Calcutta and India at large who must fight for their survival each and every day. I could never have prepared myself for all that I saw last week. For example, during one of my visits to a devastating slum, a half-clothed, poverty-stricken crippled man with his back hunched over at a ninety-degree angle limped slowly over to me. He had purchased a coconut for me with whatever small amount of money he did have and then proceeded to slice the top open for me to drink so that I could be protected from the heat. And mind you, I was the one going back to the air-conditioned hotel. Not him. What was I supposed to do with that? And that is just one of about several hundred stories I could tell.
Because we each had experiences like this and because I am sure our eyes were about to glaze over, the leaders of our group called for a debriefing in lieu of a corporate lobotomy. During this debriefing they gave us a safe place to talk about what some of us were feeling and thinking. It was great, but we really needed another entire week to hash it all out. I’ll never forget the [question one leader posed] before we left the debriefing.
“Now that you know, what will you do?”
He continued by saying, “You’ve spent your words lavishly on sharing your stories; now it’s time to spend your lives.” Talk about messing me up. And so it was to this tune that our reentry began.
I will confess something about myself. You know that I’m going through an emotionally or spiritually trying time when I bust out one of the movies from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Other girls may want Sleepless in Seattle or even Pride and Prejudice, but for me, it’s Tolkien. There was one awful season in my life when, along with reading the books, I actually watched at least one of the films every night for two months. I wish I were exaggerating. You can ask my dad, because he was so ready for me to get a grip. I was totally hogging the television, and he had deer-show watching needs that definitely were not being met. And, yeah, I know . . . spending three hours a night watching movies wasn’t exactly good stewardship of my time. But it’s the truth. I nearly have the entire trilogy memorized. And that is saying a lot since most of the proper names sound exactly the same.
Well, yesterday it happened again. This time my victim was [the third in the trilogy] The Return of the King. Have you ever seen it? Do you remember the last scene when Frodo unexpectedly boards the ship to sail to the Grey Havens? Throughout their life-threatening journey to Mordor, Frodo and Sam kept dreaming about such things like the taste of the strawberries on the Shire, but when Frodo actually does get back to the Shire, for some reason, it is like he can’t fully enjoy the normal comforts that the Shire has to offer. I’ve always speculated about why exactly Frodo has to sail to the Grey Havens. I think that Frodo has just been through too much. His scars run too deep. After years of being back at the Shire they still haven’t healed. In the movie he asks the rhetorical questions: “How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?” And then he explains, “There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep . . . that have taken hold.”
But I’m not a hobbit.
And this is real life.
I don’t get to sail off and escape from the white shores into a far green country under a swift sunrise with Gandalf.
Ironically, my life just happens to be deep in the heart of excessive American culture. And I’d be lying to you if I said I don’t enjoy it. The honest truth is that I know myself. I know that normal life will quickly pick back up and the temptation will be to forget all I have seen. To move forward without any change. While others around me may wish for me to hurry up and acclimate to normal life again, my fear is that I will too quickly move ahead. That I will forget all I have seen, heard, touched, smelled, and felt.
I know myself.
I’m just an all-American twenty-six-year-old girl, consumed with comfort, security, vanity, wealth, and materialism like the “best” of them. In light of who I know I am, I feel compelled to ask that the Lord would perform a miracle on my behalf—that He would keep the emotional wounds that were carved during the past few weeks from healing. Now I know you may think I’m a bit morbid, eccentric, or even just plain weird. But that’s okay, because I’ve been called far worse, I’m sure of it. So this is my prayer today: that time won’t have its typical way with me. That the sharp edge of the sting I feel deep in my soul won’t ever be dulled or alleviated.
You see, Melissa didn’t just want to care. She knew that deep within her soul, she needed to care. She realized that, just like the rest of us, she’d never be healed of her self-centeredness until she was wounded irreparably with love for an aching world. To help others would become life to her own lungs. As it turns out, the prophet Isaiah told us something similar centuries ago. Absorb it into the marrow of your bones, dear one, and then, before the dust can settle on the cover of this book, let’s start acting on it. So long, superficiality. You’ve fueled our insecurity way too long.
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.
The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.
Isaiah 58:6-11
Chapter 17
What Are You Afraid Of?
Any communicator worth her salt knows that the last points a decent listener hears in a message will probably be what she remembers best. That’s why I’ve waited until now to discuss the subject matter in this chapter. If you forget one hundred other references in this book, I am hoping and praying you will not forget this one. T
hink of it like a Quick Start button on an exercise bike. If you take the time to customize your program by entering your age, weight, and interval preference before the pedals start spinning, you’ll undoubtedly get a better workout. But sometimes you just don’t have the time or patience to enter the information. If you hit Quick Start, you may not get the optimum, personalized effects, but you can count on a workout.
Your road to a prevailing sense of security will be most effective and life energizing if you take the customized route that we’ve spent multiple chapters discussing. Sometimes, however, you just need to know how to hit Quick Start. For each of those moments, there’s a powerful pair of words:
Trust God.
Plain and simple. Not easy, mind you, but basic and uncomplicated. You don’t always have to hash it all out. Sometimes you can make a single swift decision. As Christ said to a wavering disciple, you just have to make up your splintered mind to “stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27). Believe that He loves you and has you covered and takes every one of your hits as if they were aimed at His own skin. Get down to the bottom of what frightens you, and then pitch it to Him like a hot potato. Let’s freeze on those three words tucked into the middle of the previous sentence for a minute:
What frightens you?
Whenever you get hit by a wave of insecurity, the wind driving it is always fear. This is true whether the flare-up is monumental or comparatively mild. The moment you’re cognizant of an outbreak of insecurity, learn to check your heart for what you’re afraid of. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll rarely come away from that diagnostic test empty-handed. No need to make this complicated. Imagine two simple scenarios.
1. You’re standing at a coworker’s desk. A simple conversation ensues. “Did you hear about . . . ?” No, you hadn’t heard. Suddenly, a wave of insecurity wells up inside of you. A fear of some kind is driving it. Learn to instantly identify it. Trade it in for trust.
