How Are You Coping?

I stood at the back of the church; my face red with embarrassment. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. How could I hide the fingers whose dirt underneath the nails had just been exposed?

The stubborn dirt that had managed to stay lodged under those nails despite my bath the night before did not bother me as much as the fact that a “friend” had called attention to that dirt. She was openly making fun of me. The condescending snicker behind her hand to another “friend” is imprinted on my brain; I hear it perfectly even today.

I was already painfully aware that I was on the fringe of things with my peers, and had been for a while already. I attended a small Christian school that was run by the church group we belonged to, so my realm of friends was quite small. The girls in my Sunday School class were the same girls I had to relate to at school every day. Mostly they just ignored me.

There was one other girl in my class who was also an outlier, a sweet girl from a totally different church denomination. She offered me friendship and kept me from feeling totally alone. I was thankful for that.

I am sure the girl who portrayed herself as quite superior to me that day in the back of the church auditorium held insecurities of her own. But I was only twelve years old and too young to understand why she delighted in being mean to me. She had often been unkind before, but that day the humiliation she so successfully covered me with became the lens through which I viewed myself every day moving forward.

I was not enough. Not beautiful enough, not wealthy enough, not worthy enough to be considered a friend to anyone.

And I did not tell a soul what had happened. Whom would I tell? Why would I tell? The shame was too great.

The dreaded Sunday School cabin trips and yearly Christmas parties added to my angst. My clothes weren’t nice enough and the gifts I brought to the exchanges didn’t measure up to the others. I endured these outings, and even in some odd, unexplainable way, a part of me enjoyed them.

As time went by, I withdrew from friends and peers. I could not escape the rejection of the real world entirely, but I found a solution to cope with it. I created my own land of make-believe, a place where I could be all the things I longed to be in the real world.

My grandma gave me a JCPenney catalog and from its pages, I carefully cut out my new friends. And as the days and months passed, they became more real to me than the people I interacted with every day.

I was fifteen when I found my first real-life friend. I was ecstatic but didn’t trust that she really found me loveable. I clung to her like glue, and I still wonder why she didn’t shake me off and run the other way. I found her friendship to be much more satisfying than the fantasy world I’d been living in.

But by now, so much time had passed in my make-believe world that I could hardly leave it. Every time I faced something in the real world that felt like rejection, I would run back to my fantasy friends for comfort.

Then I met Andrew, and I thought I had found the answer to all my insecurities. But no human being could heal me from the shame and rejection, not even my husband. It wasn’t long before I experienced those now familiar feelings in our relationship, too, and my make-believe world came back to life, minus the JCPenney friends.

Jesus started working in my heart in those days and before long I was reaching out to him, searching for a better way to live. He had been there in my childhood and teenage years-I knew that- and I truly believe he understood my coping mechanism for the struggles I faced. Some teenagers turn to pills, others to sex, and some run, as far and as hard as they can. Some even choose to take their life. Whatever the vice, it is used to try to fill a void, a loneliness, that only Jesus can fill. He was teaching me that.

He is still teaching me this lesson. Several years ago, I was brave enough to tell two friends about my habit of creating an alternate reality in my head when I am faced with difficult situations. I was surprised when I learned that I am not the only one who deals with this problem.

Recently I have felt God nudging me to stop using my imagination in this way. I didn’t understand why, knowing that there was nothing impure about the scenes I created in my head. And I love stories, both hearing them and telling them. My creative mind is a gift from him. I am convinced of that. So why ask me to stop?

How shocked I was when he opened my eyes to the fact that most of the fictitious stories in my head stem from circumstances I wish I could change but have no power over. And there is the problem! I am still using that childhood mechanism to deal with what I don’t like about my present reality. Instead of taking the issues to Jesus, accepting his plan as best, and letting him use those painful circumstances or unmet expectations, I pretend to make them better in my own head.

Only it doesn’t work. When the story ends, my reality is the same. I am still dissatisfied. And sometimes angry and lonely. Worse yet, I have robbed Jesus and me of precious moments when we could have spent conversing about what’s in my heart. No wonder he wants me to stop going there. He isn’t trying to rob me of the gift of creativity he has given me. He just doesn’t want it to be a replacement for Him. Only he can cure the emotional triggers that cause me to go there in the first place.

And do you want to know what else he has shown me? I don’t think I was as unlovable and unwanted as I thought I was back in those days. I think it is just that I viewed myself through that false lens of shame and I let one girl convince me that I wasn’t good enough.

Probably if I told my classmates today how I struggled back then they would be surprised. Maybe they would each say they faced a similar struggle. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is nothing new under the sun. We all get hurt. We all struggle with feeling as though we aren’t enough for something or someone.

But if you are that person today, chances are you are viewing yourself through a distorted lens. If you see yourself as unworthy or unlovable I want you to know that is not how Jesus sees you. He sees a person created in his image, and in him, you and I are enough. We are not perfect, not by a long shot. But I agree with what Paul said.

“I am convinced and confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will [continue to] perfect and complete it until the day of Christ Jesus [the time of his return]. Phil 1:6 AMP

My heart holds a tender ache for the hidden hurts and struggles of the people around me. I know they are there, sometimes in the silence between us, and at other times in the rush to fill that silence with whatever words come to mind.

Freedom comes when we are brave enough to let someone into our place of struggle. I want to be the person who speaks life and truth to others, helping them to shake off the lies of shame and rejection. The person who comes alongside them and helps them to see the work that Jesus is doing in their lives. The one who helps them to discover their full potential while they help me to discover mine.

Because I agree with the wise man who wrote Proverbs. He penned ten very powerful words that we would do well to remember.

 “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”