Every spring training Pro Athletes Outreach AKA PAO has a luncheon for women in baseball.  They are spread out around Florida and Arizona so women in every organization has a chance to make one of the luncheons.  Below is a few pictures of the Blue Jays ladies who attended.  Gari Meachem was one of the speakers at the luncheon.  Her husband, Bobby, was S’s manager when we were in Dunedin and New Hampshire.  She is such an amazing speaker and great author.

The first speaker was Jackie Kendall who spoke about her new book called Surrender Your Junior God Badge.  This book is about women and their battle with control.  I’m using the book as my every day devotional, so I only read a couple of pages a day.  Reading through chapters 1 and 2 I felt the need to share Jackie’s four things commonly feared by controlling women.  As a woman, you might be reading this and be like I’m not controlling.  Well if your a woman with a pulse your controlling.  It is in our genes; it dates back all the way to Eve.  She is the first woman who decided that control was better than depending on God.

I love how Jackie used little “Evettes” to describe us women.  As she describes women as “Evettes,” she uses this passage to show how the first Junior God Badge was created, “Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (Genesis 3:16 KJV).  This passage is important for us to understand where the desire to control came from.  It is in our DNA to be controlling; we entered the world this way, and we will exit the world having the need to control.  Eve gave the fruit to Adam and he ate it!  This moment changed history forever.  This story is so intriguing to me because it is essentially the core of men and women today.  Why didn’t Adam tell Eve no?  Jackie found through observation that at the very moment of choice,  Eve was controlling and Adam was a coward.  As women struggle with control, men struggle with being a coward.  This will be a topic for another blog post.

So, now that you have the basis of controlling women, I want to get into Jackie’s four things commonly feared by controlling women:

1.  The Fear of the Hypothetical “What If”
2. The Fear of Intimacy (intimacy = “into me see”)
3. The Fear of Disappointing People:  People-Pleasing Bondage
4. The Fear of Failure:  Making a Wrong Choice (failure being fatal for her self-esteem)

The Fear of the Hypothetical “What If”

We go through our head constantly thinking “what if it doesn’t go according to plan.”  The controlling woman stays up all night thinking about the elaborate plan not going as she had planned.  S and I got engaged on a Wednesday afternoon in October 2011 and immediately I was already going through dates in my  head as early as the next day.  With baseball season, February through September was out.  So, we decided on October 20, 2012.  As the days grew closer to our wedding date, I remember having wedding nightmares that things did not go according to plan.  Bridesmaids were wearing the wrong dresses; I tripped going down the aisle; band did not show up; the food was a disaster.  I literally would wake up in sweats and think I need to just control my entire wedding.  It was hard for me to pass things off to people because I wanted to make sure everything was perfect.  In the end, my veil did fall during the ceremony but, hey I was a married woman to my man regardless.  I learned that we cannot live our life with the “what ifs.”  Jackie explains,  “There is no grace for a hypothetical situation.  Grace is available only for reality.  Grace is not available for the things that might happen.  My delusional fears block God’s grace for what will happen, because my fears are not grounded in reality but fantasy.”

Another word for baseball should be “what if.”  You will literally drive yourself insane if you go through every “what if” situation that could happen during a baseball season.  Instead of trying to control the hypothetical during baseball season, I just make sure we are packed for whatever is thrown our way.  “If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this:  it is  your own doing, not God’s.  He begs you to leave the future to  Him and mind the present” Jackie says.  Proverbs 14:30 says, “A peaceful heart leads to a healthy body; jealousy is like cancer in the bones.”  A peaceful heart is not inside a tormented “what if” woman.

Fear of Intimacy (“Into me see”):  Polished Pretenders

Into me see is the fear of being vulnerable.  For the most part, we are scared of people seeing us for who we really are.  We can learn to be comfortable with our flawed nature, instead of trying to cover it up.  I made sure to underline this statement made by Jackie as she states, “The key is not achieving flawlessness, it’s being faithful although flawed.”  Many women are scared that someone will find out that they are not perfect which includes their husband and the rest of the family.  I find solace in knowing that no one human is perfect; the only perfect man was Jesus Christ.

For me, this is not a fear I struggle with.  Anybody that knows me will say I’m the most honest and real person; you will know exactly what I think by the look on my face.  I cannot hide my emotions very well.  My flaws use to bother me, and I kept praying that God would help me change.  I then realized that He created me, and He loves me with all my flaws.  I crave real conversation with other women who will be vulnerable with me.  They do not put up a wall and push me away but will engage in REAL CONVERSATION.

When I read this section of Jackie’s book,  I thought back to conversations I have had with other women, and I was telling them what I was going through; instead of lending an encouraging word or maybe letting me know they went through it too, I got crickets.  Now, as I look back on some of the conversations, I think maybe it was from a place of wanting to maintain the perfect image instead of being vulnerable.  I strive to be a real woman and not pretend to be someone I’m not.  Through baseball, I have found so many women who are willing to be vulnerable and fully escape the life of a pretender.  “A new command I give you:  Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another”  John 13:34.

Fear of Disappointing People:  People-Pleasing Bondage

Jackie says, “The fear of intimacy and vulnerability actually feeds this next fear- the bondage of ‘people-pleasing.’  People pleasing looks nice and accommodating on the surface, but it amounts to saying and doing whatever you think will keep others happy- because you are afraid of displeasing them.  The underlying motive is to protect yourself.  It’s a subtle way of control at times, because it an look like just being nice or accommodating.  The only way to identify people-pleasing is to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal your motives.”  I have a friend that is a “people-pleaser.”  Instead of doing what she feels is best for her, she will change plans to make other people happy.  She has let people walk all over her because they know in the end she will do what makes them happy.    She would rather “people-please” than deal with conflict.  Jesus condemned people-pleasing, and Paul warns us about vain pursuit:  Everything they do is done for people to see Matthew 23:5.

Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God?  Or am I trying to please people?  If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.  Galatians 1:10

People pleasers are slaves to the opinions and preferences of others.  However, trusting in the Lord, you can run free in the sunshine away from the grip of people-pleasing.  Jackie explains that once you stop pleasing people, they are no longer pleased with you.  She says, “As I have learned to surrender my Junior God Badge, I have learned how to let Him take care of the people who are aggravated because I am not pleasing them today.”

Fear of Making Wrong Choices

So, I pretty much underlined this entire section in Jackie’s book.  This is the fear that I struggle with the most out of the 4.  Jackie says, “I have met many women who cannot relate to the previous three sources of fear.  That kind of women does not care what others think about her.  She is candid and outgoing and is not afraid of being vulnerable and she doesn’t fear the hypothetical, because she moves so fast toward the future that she doesn’t even stop and consider the probability of things not going as her controlling self has planned.  But I have discovered a fourth source of fear that affects even the apparently invincible ones- the fear of making the wrong choice.  An otherwise competent woman can be incapacitated by her fear of making the wrong choice.”

Well, when I read that last night it hit the nail on the head so hard that I had to read it out loud to my husband.  In September, S and I went house hunting for our first home.  After much deliberation, we decided to build instead of buy.  What was I thinking when I cannot even make a decision like ever???  How am I going to decide on a blueprint, cabinets, paint colors, granite, tile, shutters and the list goes on.  I remember asking Facebook friends and Instagram followers what color shutters would they pick because I could not decide on a color.  The funny part about me asking the Facebook and Instagram world is I ended choosing what I had originally liked in the first place.  

Green ended up being the perfect shutter color for our home.  It got even worse when it came down to decorating and furniture.  My husband told the lady that painted our table that I just needed some encouragement that I picked the right color for our table and that it would match perfectly.  I realized not only did I do this with our home, but I feared making the wrong decision in my own life as well.  When I took my vows on October 20, 2012, I was no longer making decisions for myself but also for my husband.  My decisions affected him too.  I learned that I have to do what works for me in my life and not to compare my life to others.

How do you defuse the paralyzing fear of making the wrong choice?  Jackie says, “First and foremost, understand how God feels about failure.  From what I’ve seen, we get really confused about that.  Here’s how He feels about your failures.  He expects them.  He forgives them.  He uses them.  God is the great “recycler” of the messes we make, and none of them shock Him!”  After reading this section, I learned women who struggle with fear of making wrong choices, are being self-protected.  Of course I’m being self-protected its a woman’s nature.  I try to guard myself from things that will harm or bring hurt to me and S.  “But as for me, afflicted and in pain- may your salvation, God, protect me” Psalm 69:29.

As miniature Evettes, we are in this controlling nature together.  I believe this helps us understand each other on a different level, and we can turn our controlling nature to Jesus when it gets to be too consuming.

Thanks for reading,

XOXO

HC