Confidence

There is a story written by Max Lucado called You are Special. In it, there are little wooden characters called Wemmicks, made by a woodcarver who lives up in a house on a hill. The wooden people live in a village, and each has a box of stickers full of dots and stars. When someone does something bad or embarrassing, another Wemmick will give them a dot sticker, pressing it onto their clothing or their limbs or their face. If a Wemmick does something good or stunning, the Wemmicks will award them with a star sticker. One such wooden being, Punchinello, has only ever received dots. He trips and gets dots, he says something ridiculous and gets dots, he gets dots just for having a lot of dots. But one day, he meets a Wemmick named Lucia, who has no dots and no stars. People would try to give her stickers, but they never stuck. He asks her why this happens, and she says that it’s simple: She goes and sits with Eli, the woodcarver, every day. Punchinello finds this silly, but he’s desperate, so he tries it. He climbs the hill, walks into the big house, and almost turns back at the enormity of it when Eli calls him out by name. “Punchinello!” The woodcarver is glad to see him — he created him, and he calls him his own. As Punchinello walks out of the house that day, a dot falls off and hits the ground.

To me, this story illustrates what confidence truly is. We think of confidence as stars, and the lack of confidence as dots. But Eli, the Father God, reminds us that neither our good nor our bad traits need to define us; what other people say or think holds no weight. The only thing that will ever matter is the Father’s opinion of us, his beloved creation. He sits with us, meets with us, knows the good and the horrid, and still says, “you are mine.” Confidence can only ever come from knowing this truth, that we are his. Confidence can only ever come from the experience of our stickers falling off in the gaze of God’s love for us. 

The resulting conclusion here is that confidence does not come from inside of ourselves. This is a countercultural idea, and one that still rubs me the wrong way at times. Every Disney movie, every story we grow up with in the west, tells us that our light comes from within. The message we are sold is that if we just dig deep enough we will find our core, our true essence, and therefore our confidence. But if our core is found not in digging into our own minds, but in creating space in ourselves for God to make a home and renovate, then confidence is the overflow of that home with God. Confidence comes from allowing something outside of ourselves to do the work, not mustering or conjuring anything up on our own. Confidence is surrendering to the fact that God is God, and he is greater than my inner turmoil, emotions, and struggles. God is not my emotions.

Confidence, then, is choosing to let go of my ways of being, the paths I think will bring my joy. It is letting go of the images I conjure up of myself, and letting God give me another way to be. A few years ago, I would have written about what I feel confident in: a dream to create housing for refugees, a hope to help create a better world. I still have those dreams, but I am becoming confident in something deeper, now. I am becoming confident in my ability to walk with Christ, and in his ability to lead me. I am becoming confident that I don’t have to do anything at all to sit in God’s love; that my stars are, in fact, keeping me from deeper relationship with him. I am learning that my dots, my trauma and my fears, are not my true self after all — I don’t have to listen to them. I can, instead, sit with Father God and let the praise and the pain wash away, seeing myself as I truly am: simple, loved, broken, healed. 

At my core is a place where God asks me to invite him in and create a home. It is as he builds this home in me, and as I invite him to do a deeper thing, that confidence begins to flow. I am only now beginning to see it. I don’t know what it will look like in two years, ten years, thirty years. But I know what I hope that this home and this confidence will bring: I hope it will allow me to radiate love. When we don’t let dots define us, and we don’t allow stars puff us up, what we become is a person who can see people as they are, and love them that way. I want my confidence to create peace, and I want that peace to create love. And like Punchinello, I will sit with my maker, and allow the stickers to fall off one by one, until love is the only thing that is left.