Confidence allows us to face life with boldness, openness, and honesty.  It enables us to live without worry and to feel safe.  It enables us to live authentically.    Joyce Meyer

Confidence.

When did it start slipping away from us?

If confidence does what Joyce says it does, the only time I can remember living that authentically and freely was as a little girl.

Somewhere along the way things started to eat away at my confidence and now I find myself trying to reclaim the confidence that so quickly eludes me.

There are a lot of enemies to confidence, but there are three that seem to occur repeatedly:

1) Fear

We fear not being good enough… not being beautiful enough… not having enough… not getting what we want… not being liked… not doing something significant with our lives… and the list goes on and on.

What’s worse is that we don’t want to admit our fears, so rather than face them we stuff them under airs of self-confidence.

2) Jealousy

Need I expound on this one?

As women, I think we have an innate propensity to compare.  We compare everything: our looks, our family, our things, our intellect… And once we compare, we determine where we don’t measure up and jealousy creeps in.

3)  Insecurity

This one breaks my heart because insecurity is defined as “a profound sense of self-doubt – a deep feeling of uncertainty about our basic worth and our place in the world.”

This tells me that we are so far from understanding who God says we are.  We’ve lost site of how He values us.

“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  Ephesians 2:10

I love this quote from Beth Moore:

“If we knew who we were and what God has conferred upon us, what everybody else thought of us would grow less and less significant.”

Most of our battles with confidence occur when we are focused on ourselves.  Our fears, jealousies and insecurities become self-fulfilling prophecies that keep us from confidently being ourselves and leading from a place of confidence and security in Christ.

Which one of these enemies of confidence do you wrestle with the most?  Is there another enemy to your confidence that you would add to the list?