Real (In)Security: Part II - Naked and Alone

Fear. We all feel it. We all hate it. We try to escape it but it seems inescapable. It drives so much of what we do.

I remember being full of fear when I lived in Bolivia. I was alone, without friends or family in a foreign country where my ability to speak the language was faulty at best. I was deeply insecure about my purpose and about whether or not anyone within 100 kilometers even cared that I was alive.

I had no idea who I was or what I was doing. I felt so utterly alone and incompetent. For the first time in 23 years my parents, who had always had a daughter who found excitement in travelling away from home, could hear the loneliness flooding from their daughter’s voice on the other side of the telephone.  

But one night, while alone in my room in that distant country, I came across this photo:

And after that something changed.

My reality did not change.

My situation remained the same.

My loneliness was still there.

But that night I made a decision, a decision to try again tomorrow.

So the next day I woke up and leaned, heavy and hard, on the things I knew to be true. I knew that I was someone worth knowing, someone who had something to offer, and I also knew that my feelings of inadequacy were lying. I just had to remind myself of that.

God just had to remind me of who I was.

Slowly but surely I began to see progress and made a few new friends.

Those first 4 months in Bolivia were difficult. But I ended up leaving there full of joy, accomplishment, and a connected heart. I’d end up returning there twice more in the 18 months that followed to live and work. With God's help I overcame the fear of being alone and took life head on.

Through that experience these are some of the things I learned:

Fear is a tricky thing. In some sense it is necessary for our survival. Fear keeps us from doing stupid things, it makes us think before we leap, and it tells us when danger is near. In some sense fear can keep us safe.

But if you have too much fear it can debilitate you.

In the beginning our greatest fear was taken care of.

 “Then the Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner'" (Genesis 2:18).

Everything else God had declared good. The only thing in that perfect world that was “not good” was being alone.

I think that for many of us our greatest fear is being alone.  Not the kind of alone you necessarily feel when you are the only person in a room, but the kind of “being alone” that produces loneliness. We fear being unloved, abandoned, or not cared for. We fear being surrounded by a hundred people and feeling as though not one of them truly cares for us.

But this fear of being alone is not something that human beings began their existence with. Adam was not lonely without Eve in the Garden, he wasn't even technically "alone" because God was there with Him.

In the beginning, loneliness was not an issue because human beings enjoyed intimate communion with God and then also with each other. In the beginning we could fully be ourselves. We could be naked (Hebrew: ‘arowm), bare both in appearance and in matters of the heart. We were without pretense;  we had nothing to hide and we were unashamed (Genesis 2:25).

But then we lost our security. When humanity fell into sin her walls were quickly raised; walls of defensiveness and fear. We were given clothes for our bodies and fear for our hearts because we could no longer live in complete unhindered nakedness; we had to be clothed. Somehow sin brought with it the necessity of covering ourselves up, both physically and emotionally/mentally. 

In Genesis 3:8-10 Adam states here that he was afraid of God because He was naked. Why did his nakedness make him afraid? In reality we know the truth, Adam was not afraid of his physical nakedness – God had created Adam and was well acquainted with what an unclothed human body looked like. The word Adam used for naked, a different word than that used in 2:225, tells us why he was afraid of the Lord. The Hebrew term ‘eyrom implies a slightly different kind of nakedness. The kind that also implies helplessness. And this is why Adam was afraid. Because not only had he disobeyed God, but he was also helpless to do anything about it. He was helpless to repair the relationship; to fix it, to undo his sin; to erase any of it. And so Adam was afraid.

In a matter of seconds a relationship that was founded on security becomes founded on fear. This is because sin brings fear and shame. Sin brings the fear of not measuring up; it breaks our connection with God and others.

Not only is Adam naked and fearful, but he also quickly becomes defensive, blaming his wife for his own sin (Genesis 3:12). This man and woman who were created live in unity with one another quickly find that a wedge has now been driven between them. Two people united as one flesh became a divided flesh; relationships became broken.

Through all of the studying and thinking I have done on the subject of insecurity and fear I have some to believe that much of the suffering we inflict on others, and even the suffering we inflict on ourselves, is rooted in the things that we lost in the Garden. In the garden we lost our innocence and security. Fear and shame came on the scene and we could no longer trust that who we were was enough. We became utterly naked and helpless.  We lost the courage to boldly approach the Lord. We lost the courage to even approach one another. We lost the safety that comes from living in intimate community.

We began to fear being alone.

The very thing that God said was “not good” is the same thing that our sin brought us into. 

Loneliness has become the human condition. We all feel it, we all fear it.

But we are not alone, are we? Adam still had Eve, he even still had God. But after the fall something was fundamentally different in their relationships. Something inside of them changed when sin entered their world. Their relationships were now largely controlled by fear.

We are in the same predicament as Adam and Eve. We are born into a sinful world. We are born into a world that is riddled with fear and shame.

We are all born as sinners. It is a reality we cannot escape. And we all succumb to fear at times, to defensiveness, we like to blame others for our sins. And we all feel loneliness from time to time (or most of the time), don’t we?

How utterly hopeless this seems…

But hope isn’t lost! There are people all over the world who live lives that have largely been set free from insecurity and fear. And we are often amazed when we meet these people. They seem to have this contagious energy; they have a brilliance to them that we are drawn to.

Somehow they got their security back. Somehow they began to believe in their innocence.

It is possible. But it isn’t easy.

It will take a whole lot of courage.

I am not professing to be someone who has figured this all out, but I am professing to be someone who once lived a life riddled with insecurity, shame, and doubt. But then something changed. It began that night in Bolivia and it has continued on from then till now. My journey is not over (far from it!), but I can sit here and write to you all with a deep assurance that insecurity need not be the driving force of our lives.

So I invite you to come on this journey with me. This journey of exploring what real security looks like. If you'd like to come along for the ride then sit back, take a deep breath, tell yourself to be brave, and stay tuned for our next post about the kind of courage that changes everything.
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Do you struggle with insecurity? Have you found ways to overcome it? Do you have thoughts or comments you would like to share? Please comment below or feel free to send your stories to kait.jongsma@gmail.com - I would love to hear from you!