My Worst Ene"ME"

I have discovered something over my walk with God that has recently re-surfaced in my life. I am a bit of a competitive person. If there is a competition I want to win! I will do everything possible to beat my opponents. While there is nothing wrong with being competitive, I have recently realized that I am a little too competitive. The reason I say this is because I caught myself trying to compete with myself! I realized that I am no longer competing against others but rather against myself. There is a difference between pushing yourself to do better than before but it is a completely different level to compete with yourself. When I realized that I was competing with myself, I knew that I have a problem.

If I am to ever accomplish anything in this life I know that I must push myself to do my very best. If I settle for mediocre effort then I will get mediocre or even bad results from things that I do. I know that I must be the best that I can be, everything that God made me to be! While this may be good enough for God, it has not been good enough for me because I need perfection.

I realized I had a problem when I wasn't just pushing myself to do my best, but rather pushing myself to beat my previous accomplishments. I had decided that doing my best wasn't good enough if I didn't do better than before. I must confess that this is a problem I have had my entire life because I am a perfectionist. If the product I put together is good but not perfect, I find that I regret and beat myself up for the errors I made. This is why I compete with myself, if I think in my mind that I put out a perfect product one time then I must put out an even more perfect product the next time. Can you say, "IMPOSSIBLE!!!". When something is perfect you can't out-do it, you can only achieve a product as good. Perhaps the product is not the same exact result because of different aspects, but it can not be better than perfect.

The issue of needing to always produce perfection was brought to the forefront of my mind because I was thinking of a recent blog entry I wrote. The blog entry I wrote got very encouraging feedback from people that read it. Now, most people when they are encouraged feel good and want to repeat whatever it is that got them the praise in the first place. Not me, instead I began to worry that I could never write as well as I did in the prior blog entry. I began to worry that I couldn't out-perform myself and began to get nervous at the thought of writing another blog. I thought to myself what if people didn't like my writing as much as they did before? What would I do if I didn't get all the compliments? I decided that I would be a failure. I knew in my mind that I needed to write even better than before because I had to win the competition and make an even more perfect product. Immediately after I had these thoughts I realized how crazy I must be. What kind of insecurity is living on the inside of me to make me panic in such a way? It was at this moment that I realized I am my own worst enemy.

If you think about it, life can be rather funny. Growing up I was always trying to please my parents, grandparents, teachers, etc. I was always trying to do things good enough for them so they would praise me. Then, when I became an adult I gave my life to Jesus and He began to show me that it didn't matter what other people think because as long as I do my best, that is all that matters. I admit that almost eleven years later I am still struggling with my fear of man, my fear of what people think of me and the things I do. God has helped me to gain much success in this area despite my moments of weakness when I can't stand the thought of people not liking me. However, there is one person that no matter what, I am always worried about what they think. This person, is me. I am the most critical of myself, I don't need anybody else to beat me up because I do a really good job of it myself. It's amazing because while God is willing to accept me as I am, for some reason I am not good enough for myself. I need the perfection, I need to constantly out-perform myself. This unfortunately is very tiring because it is a never-ending cycle of constant competition. Truly, how can one compete with oneself? I have tried for many years and have gotten nowhere.

So, I began to pray. When I realized that I was almost paralyzed with fear to write a new blog because of my previous entry, I knew God had to help me. I was doing enough damage to myself, only God could bring me back to the place where He can use me once again. My prayer everyday is that God be able to use me however He needs. The problem is that when I won't settle for anything less than perfection from myself and beat myself up when I'm not perfect, I make it impossible for God to use me. How can God use somebody in other people's lives to help them when they won't accept the way He made them? Nobody is perfect and not one person on this earth is exempt from making mistakes. This is a hard lesson to learn for me, but I know that unless I begin to accept my imperfections that I am doomed to live a life of insecurity. God didn't make us perfect on purpose. The only time we can act in a perfect manner is when He is using us, which is how He planned it all along. He wants for people to know when He is moving and the sign to know He is moving is when things are going perfectly.

When I prayed, God showed me a picture of the story about the woman with the issue of blood (Mark 5:25-34). He asked me if I wanted to be healed of the emotional scars like she was healed of her issue with blood. When I was visualizing the story I saw how easy it was when she touched the hem of Jesus' garment. All she had to do was reach out to Him in faith and she was healed. God was telling me that all I had to do was ask and believe that He would heal me of my insecurities and it would be done! God is so amazing!! We as people need to have steps, 3 steps, 5 steps, 2,221,009 steps that we must follow before we feel that someone can achieve victory over an issue. I thank God that He is not like us in this manner; that He only requires us to ask and believe in His love for us, and it will be done.

Naturally, it didn't take me long to repent of my ways and ask God to heal me. And now, I am free in my mind to continue in my writing. God has freed me from my own criticisms of myself so that I am no longer concerned with being perfect but rather simply doing my best. That being said, I hope that you like this entry, but if you don't then that's okay because as much as I wrote it for you, I didn't. See, I know that God wants me to write and so when I do, I am writing for Him. I did the best I could in this entry and that is the most I can do and it is all He wants from me. I am writing because I know that it pleases Him, and that is all that matters to me. So, I have now defeated my worst enemy and am walking in victory through Christ!!

I am so excited about this victory, that I felt I must share it with you. I hope that if you struggle like I do with perfection insecurities that it encourages you to look outside of yourself and your own expectations and realize what really matters. I hope that you too will look into the eyes of God and see that He loves you just the way you are.