Advice to a Doubtful Girl

First, the girl needs to see that she is too worried. Worried about getting everything right. The truth is, there isn’t such a strict picture of what is “right” and what is not–that’s making the world too narrow. There is more truth in just doing than in sitting around, hem-hawing and mulling indefinitely over speculative things.

Second, the girl has to see how much she is worth. She won’t believe she’s worth trusting if she can’t see how much good has been built into her very being. The solution to this quandary is to develop her gifts in ways that make her happy and fulfilled.

Third, she can’t trust herself if she doesn’t finally learn that she is loved. Loved in a deeply satisfying way that makes her happy and alive. She misunderstands and thinks that the “love” she is being shown–the “love” she tries to accept and make herself aware of–is something she needs to learn to like, something dim and hard and not immediately palatable. She must understand that things are simpler and better than this, and that she is loved in a way that promotes her happiness and her being fully alive in every possible way. When she sees–and accepts–that God loves her in this really good, wholesome, exciting, perfect way–when she understands that He really wants her to be happy and fully alive–then the doubt will fade into the background, because she will no longer be split in two, trying to balance what she thinks is true but doesn’t really like with what (at a deeper level) she knows to be true and what, in fact, lights up her soul. The struggle to reconcile incompatible beliefs will be gone; her soul will no longer have to resist her mind to protect the truth of what it really desires. False thinking dies away, and she is free to see that the things she really wants are good and don’t need to be denied. She won’t have to try to convince herself to want things she doesn’t really want anymore.

(Illustration credit: Angela Barrett.)

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