day 191: Your Confidence Index?

We read about them once a month; there is the consumer confidence index, the retail confidence index, etc. Confidence indicators and indexes give us some feeling of whether things are better or worse. We do the same with other people to get a read on how things are going around us. At work we look to those who are the leaders or in-the-know to see how confident they are feeling and then we extrapolate that to our own feelings and we are either up, down or neutral in how we are thinking about the future. Some people are just confident by nature and they see the glass as constantly bubbling over and it being their glass for the drinking. We naturally gravitate to those people, until they cross the line and confidence turns to over confidence and maybe even arrogance. We all need to have a healthy dose of self-confidence to be successful at work. We start each day knowing that we will have to defend and prove our work and ourselves so having some self-confidence becomes part of the requirements. But, we need to be careful that we don't become so overly confident in ourselves that we forget about others, ignore our faults, or lose perspective of what we can and can't do humanly. Those who are over-confident in themselves always set themselves up for a big fall when something doesn't go their way or they are impacted by something that is out of their control. We are warned about being overly self-confident by James beginning with Chapter 4, verse 13: "Look here, you people who say, 'Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.' How do you know what will happen tomorrow? For your life is like the morning fog - it's here a little while, then it's gone. What you ought to say is, 'If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.' Otherwise you will be boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil." We sometimes get so caught up in our own confidently set plans that we forget that our plans are nothing but desires that can get swept away in a moment. One event out our control and our plans are washed out. We need to continue to look to God for the bigger plans that He has for us, allow our self-confidence to be checked by looking to Him first, and then let the rest fall into place. Today as you think about your future career and work plans, try putting them to Him first and see what He wants to do with you, then you can be confident in Him not just in yourself.

Reference: James 4: 13-16 (New Living Testament)