Tag Archives: Insecurity

Should We Touch Each Other?

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In the movie Tommy Boy Chris Farley’s character says to Rob Lowe’s character as they are introduced as brothers, “brothers don’t shake hands.  Brothers gotta hug.”  This is of course followed by a very awkward moment as Farley’s youthful innocence meets Lowe’s disdain.

In the Church, as well as society as a whole, we have a touch problem.  It’s real, and we need to actually start addressing it.

A few month’s ago I wrote about The Snuggery.  This is literally a place where you can go and pay money to have someone snuggle with you.  No lie.  Look it up.

As crazy as that sounds, it makes perfect sense.  We live in a world more and more devoid of proper touch.  There is a lot of abusive and sexual touch.  There is very little good touch, if we can even figure out what that means.

But the value of touch in our lives can not be understated.  It is vital and we can’t hide in a corner as the Church and just tell people no.  We need a different answer.

As a guy touch is even more complicated because touch is also a strength thing.  Here’s what I mean.  A lot of times as a young boy or teenager, touch means getting pushed around.  Are you tough enough means can you take a hit.  Are you strong enough means can you dish one out.  We get all sorts of answers to these questions growing up and those answers stay with us, even if they aren’t true anymore.

I was never a wrestle around kid.  I didn’t really know how to get hit or hit back.  Looking back, I wasn’t really weak over all, but I thought I was.  That affected how I viewed touch as I got older.  How you interact with other men physically matters and affects your confidence.

Then there is the touch of the opposite sex.  This is also all jacked up.  And in the Christian circle we are basically told don’t touch each other.  That sounds good, and I get it, but at some level, with no physical interaction at all, we just end up pushing people into a weirder and more awkward place.  If we accidentally equate all touch with shame or sin, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

When you throw in how isolated we are in daily life as singles this can be a disaster that just continues to build.  It hurts.  Touch matters.  The reality is people are doing something with their need for touch.  Touching the wrong way, burying the desire in escapism or fantasy, or just falling into isolation and awkwardness.

Many of us basically work alone.  Then literally half of us go home alone, eat alone, go to bed alone, and then get up alone and do it all again.  That does not lead to healthy touch. That leads to isolation.  Is our advice to single people going to be don’t touch?

We need a different answer than that.  The Church, and we as single people, need to engage this issue.  We need to talk about a right thinking about touch and then we need to live it out.

Touch is all over the Bible.  Jesus is constantly touching people.  This is actually one of the amazing things about Him.  He became flesh.  He lived in a place and at a particular time, just like you and me.  He sweat and smelled, and got tired and sore and He touched people – literally.  The leper, the blind, heck, even the dead.  And he was touched. Women of ill refute, came and touched him  – with their hair and kisses.  Scandalous.

I’ll admit to not having all the perfect answers to this but I believe it starts with something Zack Eswine writes in his book Sensing Jesus.  He writes, “in the New Testament, two kinds of physical touch are set in brutal contrast”.  He points out that the misuse of touch used “to consume or preserve it’s own selfish wants, lusts, desires or agendas” and in contrast a different kind that “envisions a way for Christian community to recover in Jesus how humans were originally meant to touch each other.  Physical touch is meant as a holy act.”  He goes on, “Jesus touched people.  He touched bodies.  But his was not the sexualized touch of a pornographic mind, a controlling cling, or a predator heart.  The way of Jesus’s touch graciously intends to reform our own.”

Here’s my take.  As the Church (and especially if we are going to reach out to the half of the country that is unmarried) instead of running from touch, we need to reclaim it.  In other words we need to own the discussion and do it well.  We need to freaking lead instead of reacting in fear.

This will mean confronting wrong touch and helping both the wrongly touched and the toucher deal.  As men it means dealing with our insecurities and learning our strength and then offering it – physically.  With the opposite sex on a date it means reaching for her hand without thinking about reaching into her pants and realizing that they are not the same thing.

What we can’t do is say, don’t touch, don’t experience that or grow in it, and then if you get married don’t worry, it will just turn on.  That’s ridiculous and irresponsible.

What do you do with your need for touch?  What would holy touch look like?  What have you learned about touch in your life?

Christian Sexual Prowess

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Yesterday I wrote about the fact that every guy asks the question am I good in bed?  How we answer that question is critical to our core confidence as a man.  We can wish it wasn’t that way.  We can try to over spiritualize it.  We can blow it off with joking and hiding.  But it’s still going to be there.  We question our sexual prowess as a man and we in the Christian community MUST have an answer.

At first glance it seems that as a “Christian” that there is no way that I could answer that until I’m married because I’m not supposed to have sex.  Often because we are so worried about sex outside of marriage and the costs that come with it, we end up telling men that they should just table the question and then “presto” answer it on their wedding night.  But in my opinion that is not good enough.  That might have worked a couple of generations ago when people got married by 25 but it won’t work now.

It’s a good thing to direct people to wait until marriage to have sex but it is not ok to wait until then to help them answer their question about sexual prowess.  They are going to answer it somehow.

We need to stop answering the sexual prowess question with a sexual ethics answer.  We need a different conversation.  Sexual prowess and sexual experience are not the same thing.  Thinking they are the same leads to men that are either having sex to answer the question or men that are living with lack of intimacy, touch and confidence in their ability to deliver.  Neither of those are acceptable.  The ironic thing is that our Christian theology actually does answer the sexual prowess question.

The first thing we have to do is realize that God has ultimately created us as sexual beings. It only takes one chapter in the bible for God to bring up sex.  We all have the tools, and I don’t just mean that we have the right “equipment”.

If we believe in a God that created us good, then we must start with the premise that God’s answer to do I have what it takes sexually is yes.  Let that sink in for a minute.  God says, “I have given you what you need here.  You can do this.  You have what it takes because I gave it to you.”

This is core.  Yes we are messed up because of sin. Yes we may have been wounded in this area in even horrible ways.  But at the core of who we are as a man, at the very center of it, we are created with sexual prowess.  It’s there, somewhere, no matter what our experience tells us.

The problem is we take sex out of context and turn it into it’s own question.  It becomes about performance which just kills us as men.  We fear failure.  We fear that we won’t be able to come through and when we make the act of sex the scorecard we are in trouble – even if we are “good” at it.

The act of sex was never intended to be that.  God did not create sex in it’s own context.  Sex is a part of a larger question.

Sex is not intended to be about performance.  It’s about loving another person.  It’s about trust, strength, intimacy and passion. It’s about giving and receiving. It’s about being a good lover, not about being a good performer.  This is why married sex (even in secular research) is described as the best sex.

If I try to answer the sexual prowess question without answering the intimacy question then I’m in trouble – even if I’m married.  Sex is not the goal.  In a sense it’s one of the means to the goal within the context of marriage.  As a stand alone thing, sex will not satisfy.  It will never answer the question.

If you are a good lover, you will be “good in bed”, or at least you’ll figure out how to be.  If you love well, the sex part will be there because there will be the context of trust, intimacy and passion to work on it.

The question we need to be asking is, “am I a good lover?”  It’s actually a lot harder question. If we need the woman’s approval we can’t be a good lover.  If we can’t be strong enough to be vulnerable, then we can’t be a good lover.  This is why women at their core are attracted to strength.

It’s a huge issue for us as men.  Becoming a lover is actually a stage of development just like learning to be a warrior.  Hence the wise saying, “Never give a man a sword who can’t dance.”

The good news is that we can work on all of this without having sex.  We can become lovers.  We can work on how to have intimacy and good physical touch (I’ll say more about how to do this soon).

Here’s the bottom line.  As a man growing in Christ, my sexual prowess should be growing because my identity and confidence in Him grows along with my capacity to give and receive love.   If I’m truly confident in Christ then I’ll have the freedom and strength to be a good lover – and as a part of that to be “good in bed.”

The Meek Will Not Inherit A Wife

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A few years ago I was talking with this woman I liked, when she said, “You know what, I’m so tired of Christian guys.”  I laughed, cringed, and completely understood what she meant.

She didn’t mean that she wanted to date/marry an unbeliever or that she didn’t love Jesus. She meant that she was tired of the over thinking, over spiritualizing, over nice acting “Christian” guys, of which at the time I was one.

Now, to be sure, this girl had her own issues.  But the fact remains, we have a real problem within the Christian community when it comes to dating.  It’s everybody’s fault.

We (meaning the Church big picture) have this extremely weird double standard going on where we tell guys to be basically be nice and get in line, while following all the guys who don’t.  We say don’t date around, don’t ask anyone out if you don’t know you can marry them, guard the girl’s heart, but oh by the way – lead.  What the heck?!

What we’ve created is a whole lot of nice guys that don’t act.  And when they do act they end up doing so in a weak way.

I used to be completely frustrated at the fact that the “bad guy” would always somehow have the girl, and I, who was of course the “good guy” didn’t.  But while it’s true that some of these guys were bad, what most of them were was confident, regardless of their goodness or badness.  I on the other hand, when I really liked someone, was not.

When it comes to being attractive to females, confidence is perhaps the single most important factor.  Not even a lot of females can name this, but it’s a fact.  It’s more important in terms of initial attraction than just about anything including but not limited to: looks, money, spirituality, brains, ambition, drive or sexual prowess.  Although all those things both affect and are affected by confidence.

Women describe this different ways but it is core to what they are looking for.  They want, “someone who knows who they are”, “who knows what they want”, or “who is comfortable in their own skin”.  However they describe it they are attracted to it – they respect it.  And respect is the key.

We as men, have to get a handle on this, and most of us don’t.  We think we do, but we really don’t.  It takes some real courage to confront our lack of confidence.

I’m not talking about arrogance.  Although, arrogance is more attractive than boring or weak.  It is more attractive than fearful (although most arrogant people are masking fear). And this is important: Passivity is not the opposite of Arrogance.  Humility is. And humility is not about being weak.  

It’s more than semantics.  Humility is not interchangeable with weakness, meekness, or passiveness.  You cannot be insecure and humble at the same time.

Yes Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth.  But meek as we mean it in our culture (tame, mild, bland, unambitious are given as synonyms) is not what Jesus meant.  He was none of those things.  That verse does not mean the scared and passive will inherit the kingdom.  And they for sure will not inherit a wife.

It’s a double whammy.  Confident guys get dates because they are attractive to women, and because they are confident enough to ask.  They act because they are less afraid.

But here’s the best part, a lot of Christian spokesmen seem to think the answer is telling the non-cofident guy to man up.  That is completely ridiculous.  What we need to do is two things.

First we need to help guys dig deeper into why they are insecure and passive to begin with.  The spokespeople don’t like this because it requires actual work instead of just sounding cool in a sermon or book.  But it’s essential.  We have to figure out why we are scared.  What is it that makes us insecure around the women we want to pursue.  Actually at a broader view – what makes us insecure anywhere.  Where is that coming from?

Jesus was not insecure and if we are going to follow Him then that means facing our insecurities and growing out of them.  As a side benefit, as we do, we become more attractive.  Growth is hard work, but I promise you this – Growth is Hot.  Dead serious.

Secondly, we need to give men tools in interacting with women.  Here’s why.  Men are afraid of what they don’t know how to do.  We loathe failure.  So if I’ve spent most of my life not knowing what to do with women, guess what – I’m going to be insecure in that area.

All men are confident in what they know how to do and unconfident in what they don’t know about.  Therefore if we want Christian guys to have confidence and “man up” as it were, then we need to give them the tools, not just a pep talk.

I’ll have more to say about his later this week, but for today let me leave you with a couple of questions.

When are you confident?  When are you not?  When is the first time you can remember being passive?  Do you have the tools to pursue and marry a woman?

How Do You Respond To Attraction?

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Here’s a question.  What is your immediate response to attraction?  How do you respond when you are attracted?  Do you move with ease?  Do you hesitate?  Do you let it build up and then blow it up?  Are you relaxed or nervous?  Why?

What most guys feel is some combination of excitement and fear.  What most guys do is nothing.  They choke.  I know, I’ve choked many, many times.

There is almost nothing that tells us more about ourselves as men than how we react to the threat of rejection.  And when we are attracted to someone, that threat is imminent. It tells us the truth about how we feel about ourselves, where we rank ourselves on the totem pole, and how much power we give other people that we think are “above” us on that same pole.

This by the way is why women are attracted to confidence.  It’s a natural test and one that we actually need to pass, not just fake our way through.  If we fake our way through it with posturing and gamesmanship then either we will come off “try hard” and unattractive, or we will attract her only to get crushed later.  That doesn’t mean technique and approach don’t matter, they do and we’ll get to that, but they are hard to pull off if you don’t really own it.

Here’s the questions you need to ask.  What is it that I’m afraid of and where does that come from?

Essentially we are afraid of rejection.  This leads to two other questions.  Why do you think you will be rejected (what are your insecurities) and what do you think rejection will mean (embarrassment and discomfort).  We need to face these fears head on.

What is it that makes you insecure?  In other words why will she reject you?  You know the answer to this by the way so just man up and say it.  Maybe it’s that you think you don’t make enough money.  Is it that you don’t think you are good looking enough?  Is that you aren’t fun or successful enough?  Not smart enough?  What are you insecure about?  Then ask, is it true?  Talk about scary stuff!

When you start actually working through it often you find that it isn’t true or that it doesn’t matter.  I’ve struggled with almost every one of the above mentioned insecurities.  Most of them had WAY more to do with how I viewed me than how women viewed me.  For example, I thought of myself as not good looking, but no woman had ever told me that. The thing is, when approaching a woman, how you think of you is infinitely more important than what she thinks of you.  If you project high value, chances are she will see that in you.

Again, you can try to pose your way though this.  You can try to amp it up and cover it up. But that’s like looking the answers up in the back of the book.  It works for the assignment that day, but it doesn’t help much on the exam.

David DeAngelo (“dangerous” secular guy) calls this improving your inner game.  But really as a follower of Jesus I should be facing my insecurities.  I should be finding out who I really am in Christ, which is usually a lot better than I thought.  Jesus was the most confident person ever.  We should be on that path.  If we aren’t we’ve got way bigger problems than handling attraction to women.  It’s just that attraction brings it out.  That’s why it’s good.  If we engage it, it can force us to deal with the rest of our life.

The second part is the fear of rejection itself.  As men we hate to be embarrassed or uncomfortable.  But this is where we need to relax.  What is the worst possible thing that can happen?  If she rejects you, you don’t have a date with her.  That’s where you are already.  Most women are not mean about this.  If anything they are too nice.  As long as you aren’t a jerk or a stalker you’re probably good.

Sometimes we need to remember we aren’t in 10th grade anymore.  It’s not like you are going to have to sit in class with her all day, while her friends make fun of you.  The only way to get into trouble with this is if you chase her after she says no.  Don’t ever do that.

The final reason we freeze is that most of us haven’t been taught how to approach a woman.  As men we don’t do well when we don’t have the skill to do something.  We are afraid of failure when we don’t know how to do it.  I’ll toss out some thoughts on that next week.

But for today, let me leave you with what I started with.  How do you react when you are attracted?  What are you afraid of?  What are you doing to change that?

Insecurity Is A Sin

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I have a friend who says that most men are afraid of their wives.  My joke has always been that I’m afraid of my wife and I’m not even married to her yet. Ha.

Men, even though we like to act tough and hide it, often get all wuss like when we are around someone we like.  We act differently.  We become too nice or desperate.  This is bad for many reasons but one thing for sure, as long as you are afraid of the girl, she will not be attracted to you.

Women are constantly subconsciously testing men.  Do they feel safe with you?  Can you take care of them?  Can you stand up to them and therefore stand up for them?  If you fail the test, you will not be attractive.

This is why we need to face the our insecurities with women.

Insecurity leads to all sorts of bad actions.  Defensiveness, nervous movements, bad jokes, talking too excitedly, being sarcastic, talking about ourselves all the time to prove ourselves, or acting tough just to name a few.  These things make us appear desperate – because we are.

Now obviously dealing with the opposite sex is not the only place that we face insecurity, far from it.  But it is one place that almost all of us at some point experience it.

Here’s a harsh truth.  More than making us unattractive or keeping us from a full dating life, insecurity is a sin. It’s not some type of humility.  Humility is having a right view of who I am in comparison to God and relation to others.  It means being not self focused.  That’s not insecurity.

Insecurity means that I am looking for my security and identity in someone other than Jesus.  If I’m insecure around a woman that means I need her approval.  I’ve given her the power to define me and how I feel about myself.  This is totally wrong, a form of idolatry, and it’s not attractive.

Insecurity is also a sin because it is fear based.  Fear of rejection, or fear of what others think of me.  Fear is never from God.  The truth is, every decision we make, we make either out of love or out of fear. There’s not much in between.

And this leads to perhaps the biggest reason insecurity is sin.  Insecurity gets in the way of loving others.  Think about it.  If I “like” this girl and am desperate for her to like me, then there is no way I can really love her.  You can’t love someone when you are more worried about what they think of you than what is best for them.  It’s impossible.  As long as you are focused on attaining or keeping their approval you aren’t free to love them.  As long as you are being insecure, the focus is on you not them.

This gets in the way of all sorts of ministry and it for sure gets in the way of loving those closest to us.  It also keeps us from allowing others to love us because we are constantly putting up different subconscious walls to “protect” ourselves.

You can’t have insecurity and intimacy.  Intimacy requires safety and safety requires security.

Jesus was never insecure.  In fact no one has ever been more secure in who he was than Jesus.  This is one of the reasons that so many people were drawn to Him and why so many people hated him.

He was comfortable and confident.  Therefore when you had a conversation with Him He could be fully engaged.  He was completely free to love each person He encountered precisely because He didn’t need them to like Him.  It’s not that He didn’t want people to like him – heck He invited people to follow Him for heaven’s sake, but His identity did not depend (and by the way doesn’t now) on whether you followed Him or not.  He is who He is, regardless of what anybody else does.

This is why the more I find my identity in Christ the less insecure I will be.  The more that I know how loved and secure I am in Him the less I have to fear. I can’t just know about Jesus and His truth –  I have to figure out how to actually live out of it.

Mostly what we do instead is try to cover up and hide our insecurities.  We pick only the challenges that we can win.  And in dating we only pursue people we know will like us, or we stumble around unsuccessfully chasing the women that we really want or we pursue no one.

Christian men should be the most confident attractive men that a woman can run into.  But are we?  Not from what I’ve seen.

We have to face our insecurities.  So, when are you insecure?  Where does that come from for you?  What in your story has made you that way?  Do you live more out of your fear or your identity in Christ?