Good Girl Syndrome

Senior Year of High School

As we begin this blog journey together, I wanted to share with you a very important step in my journey. In some silly way, I think I have been jealous or envious of others who had these great testimonies to share (or at least they seemed great to me). You hear testimonies of radical conversions where people are delivered from sin and bondage like drug addictions, broken homes, etc. Mine always seemed much less dramatic.

Most of my life, I have been known as a “good girl.” You know what I mean ... I didn't go to parties in high school. I never got in trouble with my parents for staying out too late or breaking a curfew. As a matter of fact, I don't think I even had a curfew! I didn't even taste alcohol until college when I had a stretch of a couple of weeks that I decided I wanted to be wild, which wasn't even that wild! I have never had the urge to do drugs—I wouldn't even know what marijuana smelled like if it was right in front of me. I have never used foul language as a part of my vocabulary. I saved myself for marriage. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. I have been the "good girl" in my mind, to those in my circle of influence and according to the world's standard. The “good girl,” that is, until God began to show me otherwise. Several events in my life combined with a study of the book of Romans sent that "good girl" facade crashing down around me like a ton of bricks.

Junior year of College

Romans 3:10-18 says, "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and they way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes." 

Four times in that passage it is says that no one is good! It doesn't say that no one is good except for those that have been a "good girl" according to the world's standards. It says that according to the only standard that matters, God's, no one is good. Which means that Lindsay Ramsey is not a "good girl." According to God's standards, I am the chief of sinners I am "full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderous, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless" (Romans 1:29-31). 

On my own and apart from the Lord Jesus, I am all those horrible things mentioned in that passage, or I am capable of being them. When I look past the "big things" and look at my depraved nature ... I have hurt a friend, I have desperately wanted what someone else had, I have been prideful, I have not trusted God, I have not been submissive to my husband, I have desired my own will about His, I have lied. My nature is depraved ... having no good in it.

If that was bad enough, then comes the sucker punch to the stomach: "You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things" (Romans 2:1). 

This is when it all came together, not only have I wrongly put myself on a pedestal thinking I am a "good girl,” but I have sometimes silently, sometimes verbally, judged others and their sin while not recognizing the sin in my own life. Instead of the judgment that I wanted to hand down in my "good girl" facade, I should have been driven to my knees in repentance for my own sin and then praised the Lord Jesus that by His grace even as a depraved sinner I have responded to the gospel in faith, and I am able to stand before Him clothed in His righteousness. "This righteousness comes from God through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe" (Romans 3:23).

And to think, I have lived most of my life as a Christian thinking that I didn’t have much of a testimony because my story didn’t include a drug addiction, broken home, abuse, or some other “awful” thing.