My Meal Is Still in the Oven:
On Faith, Courage, and Confidence
This summer my friend asked me to write something for him about confidence and how to become more confident in oneself. That’s a valid question that I think is a subject that we all struggle with at times. He said to me, “You seem so confident and you know what you’re doing. I want that.”
The very next day, a different friend called me, and he was also going through a difficult time. He told me his story and asked me for advice in the area of faith.
Look, I know that I have a lot of confidence about certain things, and others not so much. All of us are a mixture of different emotions at different times. But what struck me as interesting is that I was also experiencing a feeling inside of me, like I was reaching out for answers. I needed a boost-up as well.
When my friends both came to me around the same time, I noticed something about myself: I’d been assuming that whatever comfort I needed had to come from somewhere outside me. But sitting with their questions, trying to actually help them, I found the answers I gave weren’t borrowed from anywhere. They came from inside of me. And that made me wonder if perhaps that’s the whole point. I can’t presume to know why they came to me. But whatever the reason, their questions made me look within. If I could find encouragement for myself, maybe that’s exactly the thing that would let me help them too.
It’s relevant to mention that the last few years of my life have had a couple of major plot twists, with this summer standing out as its own season of growth and change. Not bad — just different, and sometimes hard.
Those challenges taught me something about appreciation. Not just appreciation for the support of my friends, but for the moments they let themselves be vulnerable with me — trusted me enough to ask for my answers, my encouragement. It’s from that place that I want to share this. Partly because my friend asked me to, but also because I know what it is to struggle first, and to have to find my own way to a measure of comfort. That’s what I want to share with you.
And that's why I want to talk to you about cooking!
Yes, cooking.
In your life you get hungry and thirsty, and that part of you manifests a compulsion within you to get up and go get a drink of water and eat food. Because we all like variety in our life, sometimes we find ourselves wanting to eat certain foods that seem good but that we have never tried before. Now imagine yourself cooking, or preparing some food dish that you have never tried, and inside there is this question like, “I’ve never done this before, what if I mess it up?” And then there is, “I don’t know, this seems way harder than anything I have ever done before.” But eventually, you still need to eat to live, and you do like variety. So you want to give it a shot.
Maybe you’re trying out a new recipe, and it has a lot of parts and it’s pretty complicated. You’re trying to figure out how it all works together and it can get frustrating because at some point in this process, you’re going to have several things heating up that you have to keep an eye on and maybe different methods of cutting up and prepping ingredients.
But you have a recipe. You have a set of directions, a roadmap, or guide. And even if you don’t have a recipe, you discovered this new dish from somewhere, right? You have options available to you. You can look for one or ask someone if they know how to make this dish that you want to try. If you’re feeling that uncertain, sometimes the best first step is to simply go find a recipe and read it.
Faith
Do you know what faith is? It’s never having seen the dish of food with your own eyes and never having tasted it, you have the belief that this recipe in front of you is guiding you in such a way that if you get the ingredients and follow those instructions you will have the opportunity to eat that particular dish that you have chosen.
Having a recipe doesn’t solve all your problems. You still have to work to gather your tools, prep your ingredients, and you have to do the work to put it all together. If you find yourself wondering why you feel your faith isn’t working, you need to make sure you’re taking actions towards cooking, not just thinking that this food dish will magically appear. When explaining faith to me, my dad once said, “Faith can move mountains, but you still have to pick up a shovel.”
(“Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, though not beheld.” – Hebrews 11:1 for those of you that reference the bible.)
Courage
Now, there are still plenty of times you have a set of directions and can still be wondering if you can follow them. You hear that voice, “Oh this seems pretty hard, I don’t know if I can do it.” Well, this is where courage, and certain amount of confidence comes in doesn’t it? You might be thinking, “No! I have no confidence at all that I can do it!” Okay, so no confidence yet. But this is where you can still have bravery and courage that help you to act. Courage is something you muster. You don’t even have to have it all the time!
Think about courage this way: Imagine for a moment, a burning building. The fire department comes and on the top floor, a child still stands at the window reaching out and waiting to be rescued. The building and doors are being consumed by fire, and this window has now become the child’s only possible way of escaping, as the fire quickly grows and time runs short. The firefighter yells through the noise of roaring fire and sirens to child, “Come out! Reach for me, I’ll get you.” The child looks down to the ground and realizes if they were to fall, they might not make it and maybe they are not sure if they can trust this firefighter to be able to hold onto them. They’ve never done this before and they’re feeling scared. Of course they are! But the child knows what will happen if they stay in the burning building. They’ll die. So they muster the courage, reach out, and go anyway – despite the fear, and the risk of falling. When we feel fear, we can still act.
Having courage and being brave doesn’t mean that we aren’t feeling fear or uncertainty. Actually, the opposite is true. To have courage is to act while fear is still very much present. Fear is the condition that makes courage possible. If not for these, the child might still escape, purely out of the capability to follow instruction, but it would also likely mean they were ignorant of the true danger they were in. Internally, this would be a completely different experience.
Confidence
So what is confidence? My friend that I mentioned at the beginning was clearly seeing something in me that they felt they wanted more of when they asked me to write about confidence. I don’t know what they were specifically seeing, or what exact behavior they were observing that compelled them to ask me specifically about confidence. I had to examine myself and think about how to answer in such a way that would help my friend understand what it’s like inside of me. My first thought was, “It’s not like I don’t feel fear. I do. Fear absolutely gets to have its voice, it just doesn’t always get the deciding vote. So how should I answer this question?”
The answer, I think, is that confidence is more about the decision to trust your own capacity for action, acceptance, and resourcefulness. And the more you practice something, the more confidence you gain.
When a baby learns to walk, at first maybe it is thinking about how to actually perform walking. But after the baby has learned to walk, it’s not thinking about how to put one leg in front of the other every second or wondering if it has enough strength to get to the other side the room. The baby just walks, confidently, and is now getting ready to climb the furniture! They just keep growing, still completely willing to keep trying new things.
When we look at someone’s actions, do we admire their confidence? Or might we be admiring something else that maybe goes along with confidence? Like courage. Or maybe they aren’t fearful inside at all, and they don’t even think about whatever it is they are doing as hard anymore because they have developed totally great skills and capacity. This is something to think about.
It seems to me that confidence may be more visible in the consideration of what one is willing to attempt, and the level of foundational security they’ve attained with proficiency, rather than the certainty that seems to be exhibited while attempting something new or hard. Confidence is a decision to be willing to try.
Let’s go back to our cooking example. When you’re learning to cook a new recipe, you experience different thoughts and they go something like this:
Fear: This might go badly and you could mess it all up. Then you might be embarrassed and hungry, and nobody likes feeling embarrassed. Therefore, you should avoid trying this new thing.
Faith: I trust this dish will exist beyond the outcome that I currently see.
Courage: I will at least attempt this and put the dish in the oven despite my fear of getting burned.
Confidence: I have cooked before. Therefore, I evidence that I can do it again. I can cook because I have confidence in my skills and abilities to read and interpret a recipe, follow directions, and tell time. I have the foundational skills needed to attempt a new dish.
Resourcefulness (which I see as at least one product of confidence) says: And even if everything goes wrong, I trust in myself that I know that I can clean up a mess. I know I can find food by some other means, or source. I can figure it out.
There Are No Guarantees
Sometimes you can do everything right and it still doesn’t work out for you. You can get the recipe, get good quality ingredients, correctly measure and prepare ingredients, perfectly apply temperature and time, and you put such effort and love into your dish that you’re sure it turned out perfectly. But then, maybe at the last moment you take it out of the oven, burn your hand and drop your perfect dish all over the floor! Maybe you were even closer to eating than that, and you actually had everything served up and presented beautifully on the plate, but before you could take your first bite, some unexpected disaster happened and your food was ruined. Maybe a tornado comes! Any number of things could happen in life that might prevent you from eating the gorgeous meal you prepared, even if you did every single thing right and it was beautiful and smelled delicious. There are no guarantees.
But consider, even if that turns out to be the case, you can try again. And the next time, you will have more confidence because you’ve done this before so you’re not starting over with no clue if you’re doing it right. The next time you decide to try, you start with experience. Maybe those future versions will come out even better! And the other thing you will have is the satisfaction of knowing that you did it, or that you TRIED to do it. You won’t have regret that you never tried, and no one can take that away from you.
Look, I have to acknowledge that I may be all wrong. It’s not like I cracked open a dictionary and started reading definitions of feelings and then decided to share my findings. But that’s not why you’re here anyway. If you wanted mere definitions, you wouldn’t be here, nor would you ever reach out and share your experiences of what it is to be you. And it’s not like I have a PhD in human psychology, cause I don’t. But I do know how to cook.
I’m living proof. I recently left a job I’d done for years and thought I’d never leave, and now I’m writing and building a different kind of life. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out — there are no guarantees, my meal is still in the oven. But I don’t have to look back and feel regret for never trying something I really wanted to do. It’s scary and new, and I’m doing it anyway. Whatever happens, I’m having an experience I can learn from, and that’s a great feeling.
And I feel so blessed — excited to be doing new things, talking to new people, sharing stories about the things I do know. Needing encouragement, having hurdles — that’s human, and it’s vulnerable, and it’s actually where we get to heal and grow and connect with each other. We don’t have to eat, or enjoy the benefits of our hard work, alone. As for me — I can’t wait to set the table and have company over for dinner.
