Enough. Silencing the Lies that Steal Your Confidence

For all long as there have been women, we have believed lies. Lies about who we are, who we aren’t, who God is, and who we are to one another. It goes back to the Garden of Eden, really. In Genesis 3, we find the first woman, Eve, and her encounter with the ultimate deceiver. From that moment on, he’s been lying to us and we’ve been falling for the deception.

For some of us, we don’t even remember a time in life when we felt “good enough.” For as long as there have been mirrors, there have been women standing in front of them finding what they perceive as flaws. We tell ourselves we’re unforgivable, that God doesn’t love us, or maybe that someone else is unforgivable. We’d never say these things to a sister or friend, so why do we believe them about ourselves?

It’s this historic and pending problem that Sharon Jaynes tackles in her book Enough. Silencing the Lies that Steal Your Confidence. Written by a woman, for women, Jaynes includes personal narratives of her struggle with distorted thinking as well as all-too-familiar recounts from other modern day women. Easy to relate to because many of us fight the same battles, Jaynes partners with the reader and walks her through a journey from lies to truth.

Broken into two parts, Jaynes uses the first portion of her book to break down the problem and the solution. Jaynes shows us that to fight a worthwhile battle, we need to know our enemy. And that enemy is Satan. It’s not our spouse or our seemingly perfect coworker or our uber-righteous neighbor. Our enemy is the same one Eve encountered. I’m all about giving credit where credit is due, so let’s remember that Satan is the author of lies. 

Once we have narrowed in on who is firing the shots at us, we can hone in on the specific lies he likes to use on us. The arrows he fires at me may be different than the arrows aimed at you, but they both can pierce and hurt. If we can identify them, we can stop them. Don’t be a blind target. Being conscious of your weaknesses helps you train your mind to differentiate fact from fiction – truth from lie. And it’s those truths we can learn to dwell on. Those truths are the weapon to healing our hearts, minds, and relationships.

The second portion of Enough uses individual chapters to focus on specific, but very common, lies that women believe. From lies like “I’m not good enough” to “God doesn’t love me,” we explore the detrimental distortion but also the life-giving truth. Jaynes finishes the book off with a quick-flip reference guide for scriptural truth to oppose the falsehood you may be hearing or thinking. Like any endurance building activity or discipline, the more we train our minds to identify the wrong and seek out the right, the stronger we will become.

A must read for women of all ages, Enough is written in a woman-to-woman language with solid, biblical research. It’s a wonderful place to start when you’ve had “enough” of the lies and you’re ready to accept that you’ve always been “enough” in God’s eyes.

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