Forgiveness is the Key to Confidence

I feel abnormal in that I do not have a story of self image issues. I have always felt confident in myself. I can not honestly recall a time in my life where I lacked confidence in myself. Therefore, I can not justly inform someone on how to go from 0 to 100 in confidence. What I can educate them on is how I have lived my life.

I had every reason to have low self esteem. Growing up, no boy liked me. I was very chubby and almost everyone in class picked on me (and sometimes my family picked on me). And I never said a word back to them. I cried everyday because they would not stop bullying me. I wore pretty much the same pair of shoes everyday. My clothes were always oversized...in so not a fashionable way. I never wore fashionable clothing. My hair looked all types of crazy. I always had my head in the books. I was a really smart, quiet kid who was very sensitive and overly emotional. Sometimes I could barely speak. My mom always called me lazy. Though I had my middle school crew to hang with, by high school I went to another school in a different district and I did not connect with people at the new school very well. In short, I was isolated in high school. I would literally sit by myself in a corner....until after school when I would hang with buddies from my old school at the library. Being socially isolated made me not want to go to school many days. It was torture.

Despite all these issues, I was still very confident. Being a believer of God and His promises, it did not occur to me that anything was wrong with me. I relied more on how good I was as a person to measure my value. A value I measured. And you can tell what someone values most in others by the measure by which they value themselves. (If someone values something about themselves, they will seek others who match up with that value. Even if they lack something that they value, they will still seek in others what it is they value. Or, if they lack it, they could go the opposite way and find others who lack it also to feel better about themselves.) Because I could see and love the goodness in me, all I could see was the goodness in other people...even when they hurt me. And I gravitated towards the nicest people always. In this way, I always remained in a positive mindspace. 

It is only in my adulthood where many women my age are learning how to be confident in themselves that it even occurred to me that this was a struggle for many females growing up. It's in writing this post that I am even trying to recall some of the things that women mention that they had a hard time with. I was not exempt from these experiences. All of these experiences were painful. All of them made me cry. But I went through them with a conviction about myself. As long as I was a good person, all else could be forgiven. I prided myself on being kind, considerate, empathetic, patient, virtuous. This is why I loved myself. And consequently why I loved others. And this was how the world was painful, but it was a beautiful place. Because I felt love inside myself, I saw love everywhere. 

In spite of my humble beginnings, I knew that the Bible told me that the meek shall inherit the earth. And therefore I took pride in meekness. I took pride in humility and humbleness. I took pride in obscurity. Because the earth is mine. This is a guarantee. Even when my situation looked like rags, I always felt riches. That same invisible girl to someone felt like she had it all. 

I could naturally forgive myself. I truly do not know why I got this gift while others had to learn it. Lazy? Forgiven. Fat? Forgiven. Unattractive? Forgiven. Unlikeable? Forgiven. Mute? Forgiven. Sensitive? Forgiven. Lonely? Forgiven. I never sat and thought about these things negatively about myself, because they all came through a sustainable filter of forgiveness instantaneously. I was not those things, and I was more than those things. Ultimately, these were my experiences; these things did not define who I am. My confidence was in knowing and loving God, how I treated people and how I treated myself. Did people leave my presence feeling better? That has been my primary concern in my activities in life. 

Forgive what you can't do, what you haven't done, what you are not, what you are working on, what others say, what others do....keeping forgiving and focus on becoming a better you.









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