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I am a nerd when it comes to hunting down understanding with anything related to our mental and emotional well being and how we can better relate to one another, and this new series allows me to share with you what I learn along the way.

Welcome to the first segment of “Chat With Amanda”… a video series where I discuss with you my latest mental health topic I’ve researched for your benefit (and mine ;).

In this video, I discuss what insecurity looks like in others, in ourselves, the difference between a person with insecurities and an insecure person, how we can work on our own insecurities we struggle with and the need to pinpoint where each insecurity comes from. I also share what a secure person actually behaves like and you might be surprised by what you learn!

Coming to the realization that we need the Lord in order to live for the Lord fully gives understanding with how to walk with Him.

And that dependance on Him is realized in the valley, where we come to our end and find ourselves looking for His hand.

If our lives were always comfortable and we received everything our hearts desired, how would that create in us an awareness that something glorious is missing.

You cannot experience His comfort till you are in need of His comfort. You cannot experience His love until you realize you are in want of it. You cannot know Him as your Redeemer, your Deliverer and Savior if you do not perceive your need for these as well.

You cannot be made whole until you acknowledge your hurt and brokeness.

You cannot live genuinely walking with Jesus until you tried walking on your own and failed.

We all need God in our lives. This is very true. Yet, only those that see they have a need for God to be in their lives are those that receive and follow Him wholeheartedly.

Be thankful for the trials and hardships that produced in your heart an understanding of who He is and what He means to you.

Be thankful for the valleys that brought you to this reality of your need for Jesus.

What if what you are walking through and have been walking through is to make you a constant overcomer in your life?

There are some of us that have been through a plethora of trials and we have grown weary and tired, but something is definitely happening within us. God is making us stronger and anchoring us deeper in Him.

What shook us to the core before, will no longer have that kind of power wielded over us again. And that is because God is making sure we are becoming unshakeable in Him.

This does not mean life will become simpler or easy, but it does mean we have gained a growth and maturity that will not allow trials and obstacles to destroy our faith, hope and trust in the Lord.

Blessings!

It is a good thing to desire to read the Bible.

Reading the Word of God is a spiritual discipline I have developed over the years walking with the Lord. In fact, I am just about to finish a plan I started last year reading carefully and thoughtfully through the entire Bible.

Taking in entire passages daily has been a joyful experience. I also take time to dissect a smaller passage of Scripture and meditate on those words as well.

There is so much to digest and it never gets old.

For those of you that long to have this built in discipline in your day to day, let me share a couple of tips that can help you.

Firstly, the more you read the Bible and meditate on it, the more you will want to read it. And the more you will understand what you are reading.

Include Bible reading when you spend time with the Lord. We often want to say our prayer requests to the Lord and share our hearts, but we lose time to just sit and give opportunity for Him to speak to our hearts. Reading the Word gives space for that to happen. God speaks often to us through His Word.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Hebrews 4:12, ESV

Be sure to have a mindset that reading the Bible is a joy and not a chore. Some of us have been brought up to read something as a child that we did not understand. Without that understanding the joy in it can be hard to find. This gets ingrained in our brains as something we do not like to do. Tell yourself it is a joy and that you get to read His words!

Living overseas with my husband, I realized easy access to the Bible was not an option for everyone. This reality changed my perspective with the activity of reading God’s Word. His Word is a gift to us. If we neglect this gift, we only have ourselves to blame.

Reading the Word of God out loud can re-ignite your spirit once again. If you are feeling burnout, feeling far from God or having to endure a hard time, give time to reading the Bible. It is a spring in the desert that truly never runs dry.

Because there is so much to gain from regularly reading His Word, make it a habit to read each day. Choose the same time and place to meet with God. At times it will feel like you are checking a box, thinking to yourself that it should not feel this way and maybe you should abandon this habit. But let me encourage you to not do this.

Daily coming to meet with God and daily reading the Bible, whether I feel like doing it or not, has grown to be a habit that is truly a part of me. I cannot see myself not spending time with the Lord or not pouring over His Word. It defines my relationship with Him. And He knows I will show up each and every day.

Any good habit and discipline we build into our lives begins with a choice and then the desire to do so will follow. If you long to grow closer to the Lord, to understand His Word more and to learn to hear Him more clearly, this discipline will help bring that into your life.

It is basic, it is simple.. but it is ever so powerful.

Sometimes God is behind the struggle we are being faced with. This doesn’t sound pleasant to hear, believe me I know, but it can bring the understanding you are searching for.

And if the enemy is just messing with you, God can still use your trial to do something beautiful within you!

I try very hard to not quickly blame a hard circumstance on spiritual warfare alone, making it a point to see what the Lord is doing in it. When we realize that much of our life leads us towards personal growth and maturing in the Lord, we will accept what we are walking through and posture ourselves humbly before God.

Our Lord is loving and kind! He loves you so much that He wants to see you step into the daughter or son He sees in you to be.

If we discover that we have made a mistake and we are needing to act on that discovery, we need to be aware how another voice will come and try to bring condemnation.

This voice is the enemy’s voice.

The enemy will use shame to deceive us into believing that we are a horrible person for the mistake that we made. He comes to accuse us saying that we do not have the right to be a child of God because of what we did.

And in walks our Savior who advocates for us.

He reminds us that our identity is now in Him and the mistake we have made does not equate to us being a bad person. He shares how the deception of the enemy is to confuse us into believing something about ourselves that is just not true.

It is so important that we understand how what we believe about ourselves will result in how we make choices. So if the enemy can deceive you into believing that you are a bad person because of one mistake, then he can set you on course to make more wrong choices.

Separate your wrong action from who you are. Do not give into this deception of shame from the enemy.

Tell yourself the truth.

You made a poor choice, a choice out of character, and you are going to remember who you truly are and whose you belong to. You are a child of God and you belong to Him. He has bought you at a price, an extremely high price.

The Lord brings correction and encourages us to turn from our wrong and step towards a righteous path. He does not condemn us and He does not shame us, but He does call us to repent.

You will and should feel an emotion of sadness for what you did and even regret, but you should not feel shame or that you are a bad person. Shame will keep you locked in place, unrepentant and unwilling to move forward after the wrong done.

It keeps you from the Lord and away from turning from your mistake.

You can identify this attack of shame when the emotions of regret you feel become so distressing that you find yourself moving towards self hatred. When this is happening in your heart then you need to rebuke this attack and lie of the enemy.

Shame is not yours to carry.

Identifying shame, guilt and projection…

Shame is a complicated thing when you have received its scorn a great deal in your childhood, adolescence and even young adulthood. It becomes more challenging to navigate your own emotions when it centers around guilt, false guilt, projection of shame onto you from others and when you actually have done something wrong.

Bringing up this whole topic is important so you can discern what you are actually struggling with. Asking the Lord to help you in this and bring you healing as well!

When my husband and I were first married we both had placed an unrealistic expectation on our relationship to be picture perfect. It wasn’t a spoken expectation, but later we would admit to one another what we held within our hearts. This pressure to be perfect as a couple put unnecessary stress and tension on our relationship that kept us from being able to just relax in it.

It wasn’t until we learned how most married couples, even couples in ministry, also had conflict like we were that we realized we needed to give ourselves grace. Two people coming together as one family unit takes a lot of work.

As long as both people in the marriage choose to remain teachable and humble with one another the relationship will become strong.

I have grown to see my marriage as a tool God uses to reflect back to me where I need to heal, grow and mature. And for my husband it is the same. It is within our marriage relationship where we both are made aware of our own heart issues and when we are being selfish, overly critical and un-kind at times.

With a perspective like this we can abandon the perfected vision we have in our minds of marriage, one without conflict or hardship, and truly give one another and ourselves grace.

This also keeps any cycle of shame we could find ourselves drowning in from overtaking our hearts. It makes room for true growth, repentance when we wrong one another and developing a deeper love amongst us we never thought we could have.

There is so much deception in our world and I believe it will only ramp up. The enemy, it feels like, is pulling out all the stops to lure believers away from truth and from their devotion to the Lord.

God gave me a dream to show me just how difficult it has become to discern the counterfeit from the truth. We need to ready ourselves by continuing to walk close with the Lord, know the Bible for ourselves and practice discerning good from evil.

Ask God for more discernment and wisdom!

Have you had an “out of the frying pan and into the fire” experience? This line, a very old proverb that titles the sixth chapter of The Hobbit, perfectly describes how Gandalf, the dwarves and one little hobbit flee out of the grasp of horrid mountain goblins only to find themselves now running from wolves and the orcs that have been pursuing them for days.

When I first heard that infamous phrase, I resonated with it, having experienced such emotional crises in my life. When we walk through multiple challenging issues like this, it can leave us feeling we are the only ones struggling this way. And feeling this way can lead us to isolate and withdraw. But let me be the first one to share with you, if you have not heard already, we all experience life in such a way. We all feel at times how the overwhelm and stresses can be unending.

This is not meant to minimize or invalidate what you are going through, but to let you know that there is nothing wrong with you because you are walking through these trials. You are not being severely punished nor condemned. You are not terribly flawed or unloved.

We love a good story where the good guy comes through in the end. We watch him or her come up against enemy after enemy and we hold our breath as it appears the hero has lost. Yet, in the end they make it through victoriously and come away changed.

We never think the main character deserved what they were challenged with. In fact, we peg them as the hero because of what they must walk through. We know they have what is called a character arc, where we see them grow and discover who they truly are throughout their story. And we witness their ultimate victory because of the challenges they have already met with along the way. And it was these challenges that brought them the change and growth needed to be the overcomer we knew they would become.

However, when we walk through the fire in our own lives, we are tempted to question everything and forget who we are. We succumb to the enemies lies and find ourselves in despair. Yet, God is watching our story unfold. He sees our character arc, in fact, He allows these trials to see our growth and learned dependency on Him. God sees in us what we have yet to see and it is through these trials, multiple trials even, that will bring what He sees into fruition.