Teresa Pollard is from Richmond, Virginia, and was saved at a young age. She has a Master of Arts degree in English and Creative Writing from Hollins College, and has served as a Sunday School teacher and children’s worker for most of the last forty years. She is the co-author of Not Guilty and Not Ashamed, and the author of Tokens of Promise and Woman of Light, (due out from HopeSprings Books in October). Married for forty years, she was devastated by divorce and the death of her youngest daughter, but God has blessed her with a new home and another grandson, and she now resides in Dacula, Georgia. She blogs every Tuesday at http://teresatalkstaboo.wordpress.com. Follow her on Facebook at Teresa Pollard, Author.
SELF-ESTEEM
by Teresa Pollard
In Not Ashamed, Charity Wright is an eighteen year old college freshman who has just been told that she was born as the result of a brutal rape. She’s shattered. Her self-esteem is in tatters, and she has to rediscover for herself that her sense of self-worth needs to come from the truth that she is a child of the One True King—Jesus.
This is a truth we all have to keep in mind. Some people seem to have no problems at all with that. They think they somehow deserve every good gift God can bestow. Their ego is the size of Texas. To them, the Bible issues a warning that pride goes before a fall (Proverbs 16:18), and tells them “not to think more highly of themselves than they ought” (Romans 12:3). But before we judge, we do have to realize that what seems to us like a big ego may, in reality, be just another mask for poor self-esteem.
Most of us though are more like Charity. Whether because of a dysfunctional family background, a traumatic event, a physical flaw or defect, or whatever, we simply have a hard time realizing God’s great love for us, and thus we have self-esteem issues. Unfortunately, when that cause, whatever it was, occurs in our childhood, parents, well-meaning-but-misguided adults, peers, and even so-called friends can reinforce those negative attitudes, so that by the time we become adults, they’ve become what Beth Moore calls “strongholds” in our lives, and the only way to remove them is for the Holy Spirit to do a “root canal” or an even more drastic surgery to remove the scar tissue that is stunting our growth or even choking the life right out of us.
God bless you all. Remember, you are a child of the King. He loves you more than you could ever imagine. And He encourages you to cry out to Him “Abba!” (Daddy!) whenever Satan would try to bring up those old issues of self-doubt.
More about Not Ashamed:
Charity Wright is ashamed of who she is. She just found out she was born of a brutal rape. Now, everyone tells her that her biological father has changed. They say he’s a good man who only helps people. They say she must forgive him. But do people really change? Especially when they’ve done something so heinous? Is forgiveness even possible?
Before she can confront her father with his crime, she almost literally stumbles onto another crime. In the same place. Has the rapist also become a murderer? Can Charity discover the truth before the killer strikes again? Or will her fury destroy her?
Thanks for joining me today, Teresa. Congrats on your latest release.
Blessings,
