ENSLAVED

PRACTICE: What is your most intense battle?

There is a little hidden shrine to a perceived inadequacy that lives within all of us. It will sometimes hide behind a layer of fat, an overexaggerated swagger or timid personality. I am not a psychologist, but I believe the shrine’s foundation can often be traced back to childhood when someone bigger, stronger, and particularly important to us, said or implied that we were inadequate in some way. Of course, there are a million ways as a child to be inadequate. As we grow and mature, hopefully we conquer most of them and move on, except for one or two trivial things which become bigger over time.

WORD OF CAUTION FOR ADULTS – be incredibly careful what you say about children. You never know when they are listening. Be incredibly careful what you say or do to children. You never know what will stick and become their shrine called inadequate.

A friend shared a story with me about a music teacher who made him play the “air flute” after he played incorrect notes on the real one. He doesn’t remember the duration of the punishment meted out in front of the entire class, but he remembers how he felt and what it did to him. This friend, who has a beautiful singing voice traces his not knowing how to read music back to that “air flute” incident. The teacher, unintentional I am sure, laid the foundation for an inadequacy that has withstood the test of time. By the way, inadequacies are sometimes irrational, but exist none the less.

Some of us have a shrine we erected to the god of “not good enough” or “self-doubt” or “people pleaser” or “second guessing.” Regardless of the name engraved on your shrine, they enslave. A people pleaser will neglect self to please another. When they encounter someone that takes advantage of that inadequacy, they are exploited. Insert any other descriptive term for people pleaser and the outcome is the same.

How should we redeem our inadequacy or dismantle the shrine? Acknowledge its existence. Desire to be free of it. Seek help from others with the demolition process. Or acknowledge its existence and learn to live in peaceful harmony with it. One leads to freedom and the other to…

1 Cor. 3:10

PONDER THIS THOUGHT—An inadequacy should not paralyze.