C for CONFIDENT

C in F.O.C.H stands for Confident. It is actually so easy for you to believe that you are as confident as can be, especially if you are a sanguine or choleric by temperament. I have had my share of that self deception and it took the grace of God to understand that what I thought was confidence was actually my ego.

We’ll talk more about ego as we go along but, there’s a tendency for people to believe that only guys have ego’s but in reality even females have ego’s too and to be honest they tend to deny it the most.

The confidence in F.O.C.H  woman is one that comes with complete and total trust in God because the confidence every human being possesses is limited to self. It kind of works like this, before you build your confidence in God, you must have already built trust in Him.

We hear people say all the time that you need to build and work on your self confidence and that’s really amazing but what they fail to realize is that self, like I stated earlier has a limit. God-fidence is a terminology I came up with after realizing that I can’t be as confident as I want to be, except with the help of the Holy-Spirit.

God-fidence is what it should be, and the thing with this is that God is limitless. So with Him, your confidence also becomes limitless.

I’ll explain deeper using Deborah and Ruth’s stories. Both of which were F.O.C.H women.

If you read or have read the story of Deborah, you will see that Deborah was a prophetess. Her duty/ministry required her hearing a lot from God and relaying whatever information to whoever she was sent to.

She was a prophetess yes, but she was also a human being who had feelings and to whatever degree, cared about the feelings of others.

God sent Deborah to tell Barak to go and fight a particular army and to also let him know that He (God) was going to deliver that army into his hands. But as we read the story, we see that Barak said to Deborah that he would not go to fight the battle except if she went with him which in retrospect meant that he was basing his obedience to God on a condition of whether or not Deborah went with him.

Subsequently, God told Deborah to tell Barak that it was okay that he refused to totally obey Him but that the glory that would have been for him would go to another person and not just anyone but to a woman. (In those days, that was a very big deal, for a woman to take your glory).

Let’s pause there a bit. If you look at this story critically, especially this part, you would realize that Deborah required some kind of supernatural confidence to have been able to confront Barak with such a message. It is easy for you to think ‘oh, it couldn’t have been that bad, she was a prophetess for God’s sake’ but the truth was she was still a woman who still had fears which she must have fought.

As a F.O.C.H Woman, AKA woman of God, she had to put aside those fears, some level of self-confidence which she must have realized would get her nowhere and also human feelings and take up God-fidence to be able to stand before Barak and pass that message across.  And it came to pass that exactly as she said to him, it happened.

Looking at Ruth’s story, after Ruth had lost her husband and had refused to return to her home but rather had insisted on remaining with her mother-in-law Naomi, when they returned back to Naomi’s home in Bethlehem, the bible tells us that Ruth found favor before Boaz when she went to glean in His field to the point where he even told her not to glean anywhere else but his field.

Now, when Ruth returned back to her mother-in-law and presented the food Boaz had sent her home with, Naomi rejoiced and revealed to Ruth that Boaz was one of the kinsmen that she could remarry and bear at least one son for her late husband. (this is one of those old acceptable traditional practices of the Jews).

So Naomi told her to look pretty and go and lie at the feet of Boaz in his chambers.

Pause!

Just like that, go and lie at the feet of a man you barely know and request something as serious as marriage?

It only took a kind of confidence that comes from God alone to have been able to go and lie at Boaz’s feet and also the courage to speak like the way she did.

If you look at yourself in life even, there are certain things that you know you should do and certain people you know you can request from but you don’t feel confident enough to do these things or approach the people for one reason or the other.

The Holy Spirit actually gives you a kind of confidence and boldness like He gave the disciples of Jesus to be bold and confident enough to do certain things when He visited them in that upper room.

This is the kind of confidence God wants to build in a F.O.C.H woman. A kind that places Him first before even looking around or within.