Last night’s irresponsible combination of just a tad too much coffee and Guinness dragged me from yesterday into today with zero sleep.
My brain, a locomotive (emphasis on the loco) with less chugga-chugga and more sputta-sputta, coughed out the noxious fumes of a lifetime’s worth of garbage I haven’t processed yet, lucid-dreaming myself back through so many screw ups, missteps, and self-made cruelties on an endless loop. Finally surrendering to the morning, I threw off my covers and, with fingers pressed firmly into my temples, spat my first sentence of the day:
I need more grace than I thought.
A line from a Rumi poem. For me, a seven-word prayer of surrender to the humbling assurance that I am desperately wicked (isn’t most sin desperation?) and the remembrance that there is an infinite source of beyond-mercy gifted to me despite how deeply it is undeserved.
A recent discussion with a friend turned to such assurances, in which I confessed to him that of all the theological doctrines, the one that I have complete certainty about is total depravity. I’m striving for radical honesty, so try to trust me when I tell you I know who I am, and who I am is not pretty. Wasn’t it the apostle Paul who wrote, “There is no good in me”? Let me also sign my John Hancock to that statement. Any good that I do embody is Christ. Any pure and lovely word that comes from my mouth is only by Christ’s grace. As the old spiritual goes, “I can’t even walk without You holding my hand.”
Though I am prone to acute self-deprecation, that’s not what I’m aiming at here. Self-deprecation is accusing God of bad handiwork; acknowledging my darkness is admitting that I don’t have it together and I can’t get it together, that there’s some inherent hairline fracture in me and in all of us. Not just the bad we do and the good we don’t, but a corrupt and ever-corrupting state of being. What Andrew Peterson calls “the shadow they see in my eyes”:
The brokenness that twists your problem into being about me.
The spiraling sinfulness that pulls me inward and entices me to push away community.
The idolatry of believing my wisdom to be superior to God’s.
The deadness that, as Thomas Aquinas says, renders people unable to “barely go a minute without declaring war in their minds about someone they know.”
Who will deliver me from this body of death?
To me, the interior Christian life is really God taking us by the hand to deeper levels of ourselves, totally calling out all the crap we could never unearth on our own, and slowly cleaning it up. In my life lately, He sounds kinda like this: “Here’s a wound you’re still nursing instead of letting Me heal you. Over there is a thing you’re holding back from Me. Down under that heartbreak is a root of pride you’re not confessing to. This bitterness is blinding you, knucklehead. Howsabout I teach you how to really love now?”
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Yeah, I like to think God calls me ‘knucklehead’.
“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person- though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die- but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.” – Romans 5 : 6-11
“…much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life. More than that, we also rejoice in God…”
In times of crippling doubt, my dim mind and feeble heart retreat into this: The Gospel is so beautiful, Jesus so glorious, my need so great, and my ground so shaky that I’m willing to risk my life to be saved by His.
Like Rich Mullins, surrender don’t come natural to me. I’d rather gnaw on the rotten half-joys I make for myself than toss them aside for the unbridled richness of what Jesus has promised for all those who trust in Him. Hence why sin is stupid and pleasurable for only a season. We settle for less and less only because it’s ourless and less. So impatient, so prideful. At least I am. Jesus, I really need You. I need grace upon grace, more than I know to ask for.
But I need a cross, too. A fixed point on Golgatha that stands unmoved by my fleeting flirtation with belief, some sure foundation to bind myself to. After all, Chesterton’s right: to love is to be bound. So maybe, God, You need to hold me fast.