HopeFul Reflections

Confidence and hunger can be two sides of the same coin. You don’t have to cycle between confidence and insecurity. You can choose to live in hunger, which is far more exciting. The hunger I speak of is the desire for victory and the will to fight.

Nothing feels better than confidence. The increased weight in your steps. The unbreakable smile you wear, and the strength in your shoulders. At its peak you feel indestructible and as if you could take on all the worlds. Unfortunately, once the confidence leaves, the world becomes too much. Your thoughts become too much. Your mind switches from that of the conqueror to that of the scared animal praying for survival.

What happened? Did someone reveal your weaknesses to you? Did you forget who you were and what you have accomplished in the past? Do you feel you lack the constitution and support you need? Are you out of 80’s action films to watch and did you just finish your fourth listen of “Eye of the Tiger”?

Pray, sit in meditation, and take stock. You are weak. You are deficient. You lack what is necessary to accomplish the task and that is beautiful. What’s more beautiful than a man’s righteous struggle with life. My favorite movie of all time is Rocky. The story of a nobody boxer, who wants to go the distance with the champ to prove to himself he’s somebody. Spoilers: he lost the fight. Surprisingly, no one cares about that. We care about the struggle, the heart, the dedication, and more enticingly, the hunger. He was hungry to go the distance. They could have made Rocky a superhero who got bit by a radioactive tiger and mops the floor with the champ Apollo, but that takes away from his creation story into a warrior.

Hunger is beautiful because it pulls strength out of us we never knew we had. It fortifies our minds and strengthens our bodies with sheer will. A will we doubted would last in a strong breeze. The most exciting thing about finding out we are weak is the adventure and struggle that await us. The image of victory at the end of the long journey invigorates us. The journey builds and us and gives us reason to feel confident. We must remember however, what makes hunger good and not a pathway to entitlement is the process of hope, desire, structure, and work.

I’ll apply it to my own life as an example. I’ve become frustrated with my weight and I’ve lost confidence in my ability to succeed in weight loss despite success in the past because this is the heaviest I’ve ever been and the longest I’ve been overweight. I can’t say the people around me have made it easy to forget this fact either.

However, I still have hope that I can change and I have decided it is an inevitability. If I lose hope, I pray and meditate on the reality where I am successful. I desire change and have my goal in mind. I want it more than food. I want it more than anything. My structure is the plan I have for how to achieve my goal in a realistic manner. Finally, now that I have these things, I will work. I will not allow anything, whether it be internal doubt or external obstacles to hinder me. I will see only my path and I will struggle because that is beautiful to me.

But he said to me, “My Grace is sufficient for you , for my power is made perfect in weakness. ”

-2 Corinthians 12:9-10

-JKG