Free Lifetime Guarantee by Bill Gillham

there playing, scared to death. I had to play; I needed what I perceived it could do for me, which was to help me accept myself better.
    I even went out for college football so I could say I played football in college. They nearly killed me!
Move Over, Clark Gable!
    What else could a high school boy do to build up his masculine image? Well, he could seduce the women. But wait a minute. Back there in Chapter 1, we learned that a small child learns about himself from the feedback he gets from others. And in our house, nobody ever kissed anybody. So at age fifteen, the kid had virgin lips! Mom didn’t even let the dog lick me. So how did I feel about myself? Unkissy. Oh, man, how I longed to kiss the women, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to even try. My feeler was stuck.
    You can readily see that I was not into sex. While I was desiring to be sexually active at level 10, I was intimidated by the thoughts that I would be rejected or that I would fail, and that was a 10. Thus, all my sexual experiences took place at the fantasy level. When I ultimately got saved, these flesh patterns were going to haunt me as I tried to walk in a godly manner. I was going to pay a heavy price for striving for acceptance as a male.
“Vengeance Is Mine,” Saith the Threatened Male
    Somewhere along the way, I discovered a tool that I added to my toolbox and that proved to be very effective in helping me accept myself. It was more a weapon than a tool. I directed it at the people who were the major threat to my self-acceptance as a male. Who were those people? Strong, aggressive, assertive females. They instantly triggered in me all the frustrations I had experienced since childhood. If I could just get them out of my life, if I could destroy them, that would give me a feeling of superiority, of conquest. I couldn’t do it sexually, as I have already explained, but there was another way. I could do it with my tongue.
    As a male, God made me more of a logical thinker than your typical female. She tends to be more of an intuitive thinker, more of a sensitive person. If I came in contact with a strong gal in high school, I would use sarcasm and invective on her. I would catch her in a group setting, rarely one-on-one, and make fun of her—ridicule the way she looked, the way she sang, the way she acted, the new zit she was trying to hide on her neck, or whatever—until she broke from the stress. You see, she couldn’t fight that way. Her sensitivity would disarm her, whereas I was insulated with indifference to her hurt. I could laugh off her retorts and hurl double the insults back in her face. She would break and begin to cry or scream at me. At this point it was usually difficult for me to keep a straight face, because inside I was experiencing glee. I had won!
    Sad, isn’t it? But look around you at the millions of marriages, both Christian and non-Christian, that fit this mold. A strong gal is married to a threatened guy, and open warfare is the order of the day.
    I am not proud of what I just told you about myself. Quite the contrary. But do you see a picture of a seventeen-year-old boy struggling for self-esteem? Do you see that’s how he played Lord of the Ring in an effort to generate and maintain self-esteem? And when I got saved, all this garbage was going to become my “old ways,” my flesh that I would have to struggle against.
My “Completer”
    As my flesh was being formed along the lines I’ve just described, Anabel, my sweet wife whom the Father gave to me, was also having her flesh shaped. I’ll let her tell the story in her own words.
    Bill was having lunch recently with Harold, a friend who had been my classmate at dear old Poteau High. Harold was a very competent, aggressive student—an athlete. As they were discussing years gone by, Harold made this observation: “You know, Bill, Anabel and I were in the same class when we were growing up there in Poteau. I had one goal. That was to beat her in at least one