the Forest of Insecurities: Endurance for Life, #1

By Adam Metz

This book is for anyone in need of endurance and encouragement for life. 

Travel with me into the Forest of Insecurities, as I discuss real-life examples while taking a reflective look into the chasm of sacrifice and the dense undergrowth of comparison as we follow after Jesus, making some noise along the way, avoiding the traps, and walking our trails with purpose. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Metz
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215276617

Book preview

Into the Forest

Ironically, it seems to me, the trail into the forest began with Christianity, or rather my twisted application of it. The more I had read of the Bible while living contrary to the Bible, the higher I valued living examples of how these teachings of Jesus were actually meant to be applied. I looked to parents, brothers, teachers, church leaders, friends, extended family, and unsurprisingly no single person followed Jesus perfectly. In fact, this is part of what we learn as Christians. We who are following Jesus are being perfected, which means none of us have arrived. None of us are fully perfected in this earthly life. Jesus is the only exception because he is God and chose to live among us as God in human flesh. Fully God and fully man. Because of this, he accomplished what we could not. He accomplished what we can not. He accomplished what we will not. I say it in those three ways because his accomplishment is not something within our capacity to ever replicate. It is beyond us, besides being unnecessary. If we could have experienced for ourselves or in some span of time eventually attain our own personal perfection, then we have no need of Jesus, his accomplishments on our behalf, or his teachings. Having said that, growing up I felt an overwhelming need to look to people, those living examples, who seemed to have accomplished some shadow of what Jesus did so that I could, in my own estimation, match, surpass, or discount them and whatever they did.

As I was growing up, the insecurity trees became deeply rooted, soaking up the waters of systematic comparison. ‘I am not nearly as corrupt as Constance. She looks weird and has a temper.’ Unforgivable. Constance was practically asking to be burned at the stake. One fault or flaw was enough for my compassionless decision to begin seeing myself as equal to, better than, and then better without. This was my way of perpetuating self-idolatry and figuratively offering up human sacrifices in worship of me as a means of bolstering my own fragility.

My methods of comparison were not intentionally meant to be cruel. Nonetheless, that is what they were - cruel. I started out wanting to know who was further along in the walk of faith in Jesus in order to follow worthy people. Afterall, bad company corrupts good morals and walking with the wise will help me be wise. The practice of following exemplary people is a good practice, a biblical practice. Find someone following Jesus and follow them so far as they follow him. Paul encourages this very thing in his first letter to the Corinthian church. He literally tells the congregants to be imitators of him as he is an imitator of Jesus. We can also see in the same letter that Paul had sent Timothy to them for the express purpose of reminding them of Paul’s ways that vividly and outwardly portray the teachings Paul shares wherever he goes. Timothy’s reminders in Corinth were likewise more than verbal. He lived out these teachings as a faithful child of the faith. * Please note that stars indicate Bible references provided at the end of each chapter in reference to the marked paragraph for the purpose of personal study.

Knowing my objective was grounded in good, biblical practice, where did I go wrong? My ultimate motivation was merely personal development. What is so wrong with personal development? Simply put, it can be too self-focused and short-sighted. Personally, I quickly lost sight of Jesus in a massive crowd of other professing followers like myself. With my eyes losing focus on Jesus, I compared myself to the crowd, thinking I could surpass more and more of them by using an unbiblical measure of moral law and perceiving myself to be above them and closer to God. However, the unintentional consequence of crowning myself as king based on my own merit meant that I was not only deposing the crowd but also Jesus, whose righteousness is freely imparted to them. I failed to account for the cross of Christ; God’s means of satisfying his own wrath. Instead, I was keeping strict account of the errors of others in order to remain in my own eyes favorable, worthy, and righteous, which conversely brought about a deeper sense of unworthiness and insecurity because of the measure of judgment doubling back to attack me and intensifying my apparent need to rise above the people around me. *

We will in the course of this book continue to turn to the Bible for ultimate correction, but God also uses the people around us to confront us with the truth. At times, as long as we’re open to it, God will use some of the most unlikely people. For example, my high school soccer coach, who was not someone I would have considered a model of good character, liked to use one particular phrase of encouragement to keep his players humble: Who do you think you are? King S. of Turd Island? These simple words of wisdom resonated within me in times of particular haughtiness and helped me to know that I was not fooling or impressing anyone, especially not God. And God was not willing to allow me to remain in my own foolishness. In his loving kindness, God helped bring me out of self-delusion through the use of a vulgar phrase, which was translated within me to be something good. As we proceed in examining similar encounters, not all of which were handled well by any stretch of the imagination, we will be looking to better understand how God uses his Word and the people around us to help us through the forest.

As we begin our journey, despite certain knowledge of and personal lessons in humility, I continued on for years despising a majority of the living human examples set before me, inevitably matching them, surpassing them, and discounting them. Matching, surpassing, discounting. This destructive pattern of expression is not the way to follow after Jesus. This is merely a means of mimicking attributes of the people who we perceive to be closer than us to God. We admire them. Until we don’t. We follow them. Until we can’t or won’t.

1 Corinthians 4:17; 11:1; 15:33; 16:10; Proverbs 13:20; 1 Timothy 1:1-2; Matthew 7:2

Fearing the Chasm

For a time, I looked to a friend. He was personable. He had an understanding of the Bible and taught others about God. He lived out how to love across the various environments of life. Naturally, I sought to spend more time with someone I saw as authentically following Jesus. But then, it happened. I perceived that he started slipping. He began pursuing a relationship with a woman, whom I felt should have been off limits. To me, the idea was ill conceived. And that was it. It didn’t take much. It never does. His moral decline in my mind was rapid and permanent. And in this way, in this dichotomous perspective of either seeing only strengths or flaws, I judged him as no longer being worthy of being my primary intermediary in my disjointed and irresponsible following of people who seem to be following Jesus. With him out of the way, discounted and tossed aside, I felt superior, despite my own moral failings. I felt as though I had finally surpassed him in the Christian walk.

But is that the goal? To be better or feel that I am better than someone else. That can’t be right.

This terrible pattern of friendship was not applied to every friendship. Some friendships have withstood the test of time and are going strong even now. These dear people were set apart, by God's grace, and spared from the corrupted courtroom of my mind. We will come back to them later, I assure you. For now, I want us to consider how following someone from a distance leaves room for us to mercilessly cancel them.

Cancel culture is nothing new. I have been doing this for a while, long before someone coined the phrase. Am I a pioneer? Not even. Am I proud of this? Not in the slightest. I only used this method of cancellation to discount others and make myself feel like I had obtained some mark of where I thought I ought to be.

'You have so much potential.' Ugh. I'm not going to go so far as to say we should never use this as an encouragement to anyone, but let me tell you what I was hearing: 'You are a disappointment.' I wish Steven He, CEO of Failure Management and his hilarious YouTube channel had been around then. Steven has an incredible knack for comedically capturing in his videos our extreme competitiveness and tendencies to compare, to diminish our accomplishments. In one series of comedy sketches, Steven’s father, who is also played by Steven, teaches the audience of parent viewers how to create a feeling within their children that they will never measure up or do things right, which helps maximize the emotional damage