Insecurity and Love

I am alternately the maverick Christian who is going to God's will and love everyone with no care as to what people think of me in comparison to what God thinks, and the insecure sellout who will do most things to feel accepted and loved by a group. I switch back and forth without really noticing.

Prof. Janosz once said, "To some extent, most people will always see themselves as they did in middle school." I think this is more true than we like to admit. Most of the people I have talked to about this have had a very unpleasant experience of middle school, and I think probably I more than many.

A lot of people feel like they are secretly unlovely in some way. People are afraid of being fat, stupid, or boring. I used to think that what I was afraid of was that no one likes me. But I don't really think that's it. I think more accurately, I'm afraid that no one wants to be close to me. I'm afraid that I annoy and hurt people without meaning to. (Which I know is true sometimes, and I don't mean to bother people.) I'm afraid that secretly, everyone is just tolerating me because they don't want to tell me that they don't like me.

I understand that this fairly paranoid and not very logical. However, this is how I saw myself in middle school, and I haven't really shaken the prejudice towards the viewpoint yet. It seems like most groups of people pick some people to be loved more than others, (including those at Moody) and I don't like that. It feels too much like a competition. I played the game once and manage to be very popular in one particular group, but I found I still didn't feel loved because I had tried very hard to present a face that really isn't me. I knew the person people loved was not really me, and I was angry at them for not realizing this. I also drained a lot of my energy being someone I wasn't.

So now I am mostly content to be loved for who I am by those people who who choose to do so. Knowing that I am a child of God helps me be okay with not being loved by most people most of the time, but I'm still afraid that everyone is secretly tolerating me because they don't want to tell me that they don't like me. I guess that that is a part of the war between my soul and my flesh. My soul is secure in Christ but my flesh is not, understandably.

I like Donald Miller's thought's on the subject:
"DOOR: How do you feel the church uses love as a commodity?

MILLER: When we talk about relationships with people, we use phrases like "invest in people," "this person is priceless," or "this relationship is bankrupt." By using economic metaphor we've begun to think of love like money. There is this sense that we can't love homosexuals because that's endorsing them. So, we spout little cliches like "hate the sin, but love the sinner" but we don't actually do that. We sort of isolate ourselves from the world because we fear them, we don't understand them. I think the root of that problem is the fact that we treat love like money. We exist in this social economy where we use affection as dollars."

I got this from an interview that I found online, although he says the same thing in more detail in Blue Like Jazz.