18. He is the source of power.

When I was living in the sorority house, I remember that all of the outlets were upside down. I have no explanation for this phenomenon but I imagine the person who installed them just wanted to play a cruel joke on a lot of women for a very long time. It worked. I still try to plug my blow dryer into outlets upside down. It scarred me for life.

The funny thing is, in addition to the upside down outlets, some of the outlets didn't work. You'd plug them (upside down) into the top outlet, and... nothing. So you'd move it to the outlet beneath it and voilà-- POWER! My hair could be dried after all, thank goodness.

One of the actual dreaded outlets,
photo cred: Claire Boyts.. that
little princess!!

I've been reading a book called, "When people are BIG and God is small" by Ed Welch. In this book, he writes about our disturbing fear of people. I heard an analogy today from a good friend that said, "When you rely too much on people to give you your worth, it's like plugging a cord into the wrong socket and expecting to get power from it." When we plug into people to get our source of power and well-being, it's like plugging in our blow dryers upside down, into the wrong outlet. We get nothing. Our hair.. stays wet. People will let us down because they aren't capable of giving us power. It is a 100% guarantee of failure, we get no return on investment, and the worst thing is, it is idol-worship. No, it's not a precious little thing that we carved out of wood and pray to like the ancestors we judge for doing so in the OT, but rather, making people more important than God. Any THING we see more important than God is an idol.

This isn't a journey of "loving ourselves more," but instead learning to fear God more. How silly of us to spend so much time fearing people, when there is an active, living God out there who could destroy us in a split second? The answer is, stop plugging into people and start plugging into God. People can't give us anything, they are just like us. Welch points out that when we need people, we can't love them. So adding to our frustrations of not being "powered up" by other people, we also fail to love them like we want to.

"Well Emmy, I don't have ways to plug into God, what the heck does that even mean anyways???"

I thought you might ask, so I prepared a list of suggestions for how you can plug into God, and stop plugging into people:

1. Realize that all people are the same: messed up, broken, trying to put on a front to get ahead in life and appear all neat and put together. No person is perfect.
2. Spend time learning about who God is as a warrior (fighting for His people.) I suggest any book of the Old Testament, and a good book for this is "God is a Warrior," by Tremper Longman III.
3. Or just spend time in general learning about the character of God. I recommend "Knowledge of the Holy" by A.W. Tozer.
4. Go look outside...
5. Read any scripture
6. Keep a journal, look back on it in a year or so and see how many of your prayers were answered by people, and how many were answered by God (it'll look something like this: God, 110. People, 0.)
7. Notice that what promises to give us power by the worlds standards doesn't deliver. 
8. Matthew 6

I hope that you can take these things, and come up with a few of your own and figure out how to stop living this life trying to get your worth from things that cannot deliver. God wants to power us up, to fill us with all good things. We just have to spend time letting him in.

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This is a blog post about how to find your worth in God, not an extensive description of worth in general or the the current state of our society today concerning the matter of young women and their perceived value. It is merely a beginning.

If you would like to help me with further research so I can expand the subject of helping young women find their worth in general, please take this 30-second survey: 

Click HERE to lend your perspective!

I don't use your info for anything,  it's completely anonymous. I am simply looking for answers that only your unique perspective can help me to find. 

Thanks for your help.

Emmy