The Core Truths, Part 3 of 4

Time for the fourth core truth about confidence: Aside from God, whatever you base your sense of self-worth on will fail you at some point and heap pressure on you every time you feel it is threatened.

This is another one I've mentioned several times in the last few weeks, but the reason I want to bring it up is to focus on our failures as humans. It's axiomatic to say that everyone screws up. We know it. For most offenses and most people, we're even willing to give them second chances. We know we screw up ourselves, too, yet for whatever reason, we seek our self worth in methods that require absolute perfection to achieve. It could be a certain figure you'd like to see in the mirror but never seem to manage to achieve, let alone keep. It could be being the best employee in your office, but that's always one failure away from changing. It could be having the coolest toys, but new technology rolls out every month. It could be having the hottest girlfriend or boyfriend, but there's always that risk they'll find someone else or someone else will be hotter than they are. The risk of failure is everywhere...No, let me rephrase...Risk implies the possibility of it not happening. Failure is imminent. It will happen. And it won't just happen once, but time and time and time again. You're too human not to fail.

This, though, is where we need to start being honest with ourselves even though it hurts. I'm not just talking about a failure to accomplish something a few times, but that you'll eventually get. This is not like Michael Jordan not making his high school basketball team, then going out and busting his rear for a year to get better. This is about becoming Michael Jordan, but still not achieving what you really wanted.

Here's what I mean: a few years ago, Jordan, John Stockton, and David Robinson were all inducted into the Hall of Fame together. John Stockton gave the status quo speech, thankful, with some humility (whether feigned or real, who knows?), and simple. David Robinson gave the class act speech, thanking pretty much everybody and deferring a lot of the credit to those who had helped him along the way. Jordan came up and basically tried to humiliate everyone who had said he wasn't good enough along the way. His speech was short on thanks, and even that was marred with self-aggrandizement. In short, he still wasn't satisfied that almost every basketball fan on the planet thinks he's the best player to every play the game; he had to rub it in the face of those who told him he wasn't.

The point is that you could achieve your dreams, the very thing you're striving so hard for right now, and it won't be enough. You'll be happy for a while and feel pretty good about yourself, but then that thing will be threatened somehow, or you'll at least perceive a threat, and then you'll try to hold on to that thing. This is a subpoint of this core truth: We cling to that which gives us our value. We are loathe to let it go for any reason, which is one of the reasons it's so difficult to switch over to having a true Christian confidence. It's also why it's so important that we let it go.