Not everyone is confident and not everyone who seems confident actually is. In the world of sport, each athlete began with a measure of confidence but needed to overcome many failed attempts. The most talented violinist began making the sounds of a yowling cat before reaching the confidence of a virtuoso concert performer! Generally, confidence has a direct relationship with experience. However, you may be an experienced gardener and yet, when it comes to sowing seeds, you cannot be 100% confident of germination for every seed sown. In statistics, the concept of ‘confidence intervals’ is used – simply put, it means the ‘percentage confidence’ you can have in an event happening. Someone betting money on a horse would like to know it is going to win but they cannot be sure. This Booster will help you reflect on your self-confidence, the confidence you have in others and whether or not you have confidence in God, now or in the past.
- ‘There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity’ – Samuel Johnson
- ‘You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do’ – Eleanor Roosevelt
- ‘People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within’ – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- ‘Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man could stake his life on it a thousand times’ – Martin Luther
When you were born, confidence was not something you thought about! It is however an attribute that everyone wants as they become aware and it comes more easily to some than to others. A recently hatched chick doesn’t think about confidence either! It has been hatched, fed and kept safe in the nest, perhaps looking over the edge more and more, but the time comes to fledge and to fly. No leaving the nest, no flight, no independence, no survival. Some bird species are able to fly within hours or days after hatching from the egg! Smaller birds fledge earlier than larger ones because they take less time to grow and develop. Sparrows will spend up to 16 days in the nest before they are ready to fly on their own. By contrast, large birds like eagles may stay in the nest up to 12 weeks! One Arctic Tern chick was recorded as flying 2,500 miles on its first flight from Greenland to England! Over-confidence in a chick that is not fledged could lead it to a premature attempt to fly and so an early death.
If you have had good parents, they will have given you good care, helping you progress from one stage to the next. So you learnt to eat, to walk, to talk, to share, to trust … and then you learnt to run (sadly not to fly!). Ultimately, you too were ready to leave the nest, make your own choices and live independently. People would soon work out if you were over- or under-confident by your language, behaviour and achievements. Although healthy realism is important not everyone is self-aware. Do you think of yourself as more or less confident now than you were 5 years ago and why?
Your answer will be related to your experience of life and your interaction with other people. What others say has a big impact on you, for good or bad. But how confident can you be in others? After a few disappointments and scams, you will be more hesitant to trust and may become cynical. How can we then have a genuinely healthy confidence in ourselves, in others or even in God? It all comes back to realising who you are and who God is. If we think we can control the world and our lives, we will fall flat on our faces very quickly. However, when we understand that God made us ‘in His likeness’ to be in relationship with Him, it changes everything for then, we live:
- BECAUSE of Him – He gave us life
- WITH Him – He is always with us
- FOR Him – We live to enjoy Him and bring joy to Him by living to our full potential
If you are living this way, you are among the most blessed and ‘richest’ people on earth. These things are then true for your life:
- ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’ – Philippians 4:13
- ‘Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then I will be confident’ – Psalm 27:3
- ‘…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus’ – Philippians 1:6
- ‘And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming’ – 1 John 2:28
David is a character in the Bible who lived a very full life with his share of successes and failures. He knew however that God was for him and not against him. If you trust God and have your confidence in Him, you are wise for He will never fail or forsake you: This is what David learnt:
- ‘I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord’ – Psalm 27:13-14
Be inspired by Sanctus Real’s song, ‘Confidence’:
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