Last year, a friend and I (let’s call her Persethany) were feeling pretty down in the dumps. We were lost; 2 twenty-somethings in a new(ish) city, trying to figure out…literally… how to do life. We tried everything, but after countless trendy happy hours, a full head of hair extensions, and one SPCA-adopted kitten, we became desperate. What did we have to be so down about? We had jobs. We had a few friends. We had a nearby mall. Why were we feeling so hopeless? How do we fix this? So we did the only thing we knew to do: peruse the self-help section of half price books.
I won’t give you a full review of the book “Quarterlife Crisis”, but let me just say that we did not get through half of it and were worse off for that miserable half we did read. “Here’s Maggie. She is 26 and has a great job, great friends, and a loving family. But she wishes she could sit in her tub and read Sylvia Plath…All. Day. Long. She’s just like you, a total loser.”
Thanks for making be feel better, Quarterlife Crisis assholes. You’ve just given me a laundry list of folks who are better off than us, but still cry themselves to sleep and are basically biding their time before retirement and subsequent death. That $6.50 could have gone toward a gaudy necklace from forever 21 or 2 bottles of the finest Aldi Winking Owl, but no…we were swindled like a couple of tourists.
Imagine our joy when we began to meet more people in Dallas, namely 2 ladies not unlike ourselves who joined us for a Mexican getaway this past summer (we’ll call them Pam and Maudra). The four of us bonded almost immediately over wine spritzers and our own secrets, which has led to us spending a lot of time together. Pam began reading So Long, Insecurity (SLI) and after a chapter of it, decided it was probably a good idea to share it with us – and thus, our book club began.
I’m not going to sit here and say that I am cured of all insecurity or that I was even painfully insecure to begin with…but the combination of this year of maturation and hearing the simple and beautiful truths in this book have allowed me to really evaluate myself and think, hey…I’m not as crazy is I thought was (or actually was in 2009).
If you deal with even a small shred of insecurity; if there is something you don’t have that makes you think, “if I can just get that, I’ll be ok.” If you lose sleep over a fear of losing something; if you have made a fool of yourself simply because you either feel like everything is your fault or anything someone says to you feels like a threat…pick up this book. You can email me if you want to, but I’ll probably just tell you to call your best friend, pour a cocktail, and cry it out. And after doing that repeatedly doesn’t help, pick up the SLI. Sure, it’s a little wordy and she goes on a rant about Victoria’s Secret…but still, it’s a great read.
Bottom line: there is nothing on this earth that can give you true security. We are souls who were made to bring glory to a mighty God who loves us more deeply than our human minds can comprehend. To find security is to find it in the Lord and know that He is enough. It is so much easier said than done, but something that has truly affected me is just learning about Him. I once heard someone quote, “The heart can not love what it does not know.” To know the Lord well is to love him intensely. The pursuit of His character has put everything into perspective: I belong to the Lord and He is good. (Matt Chandler said it wonderfully here).
One of my favorite parts of this whole story – we all took the cover off the book when we were reading it because having Beth Moore’s face and “SO LONG, INSECURITY” plastered all over it made us feel a little…silly. We’ll say silly.
Love/Miss/Namaste.
