Often the biggest obstacle to living out our faith is our own doubt.
Doubt about our own worth, our abilities, our relationship with God and the situations in our lives.
Susie and fellow author-speaker Renee Swope take a look at Renee’s book, A Confident Heart. Her book came out of her own personal journey with self-doubt.
“I didn’t realize that I struggled with self-doubt. Often times I would call it fear or worry.”
She explained that a few years ago she was struggling with a sense of almost paralyzing self-doubt. God showed her, as she unpacked those feelings, that fear and worry were the end results of self-doubt and the reason she wasn’t confident.
“I had been addressing the fear and worry and He wanted me to get to the root of it and really address thoughts of ‘I’m not good enough,’ ‘I don’t have what it takes,’ ‘I don’t have anything special to offer,’ ‘I’m such a failure.'”
She realized she was allowing mistakes and sin to define her instead of learning from those things. The more she explored the self doubt in her life she realized it stemmed out of her childhood.
Some self-doubt is a natural part of being human, since we are in fact, not perfect. In some cases, though, a particular self-doubt can get out of hand. For Renee, that was the fear of abandonment.
Her parents divorced when she was two. She had always believed that if she had been prettier or funnier or smarter it wouldn’t have happened. This grew into a lie that she believed about herself, that she “wasn’t worth staying for.” This lie led to problems in her young adult life and in her marriage.
Realizing the effect of this lie and the importance of being confident led her to write her book. As she has talked to more women across the country she’s realized that these ideas are very prevalent, as she discusses in the rest of her interview with Susie.
Key Scriptures: Hebrews 10:35-36, 39
