Last time I checked I was human. That being the case, I have the occasional day or twenty in which the only things I can really see about myself are my failures. My inability to be better at relationships. My lack of business and entrepreneurial savvy. My past mistakes. My present mistakes. My busted window A/C unit, held together by duct tape, my ’99 Buick Regal that manages to produce dubstep sounding tracks without the radio even being on, and a sometimes anxiety-inducing lack of “wealthy” status.
Hey, like I said, I’m a human being. And I, like everyone else, have those days (or months).
In such moments, I wish I could honestly claim the confession of the late Brennan Manning as my own, when he said, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it,” but alas, as comforting as the sentiment is, the honesty part is not always present.
But it will be present here…
Sometimes my deepest awareness of myself is that I’m a failure. I know, I know, it’s not the actual truth, and what I do doesn’t define me, and so on and so forth. I know all of that, have memorized every cliche’ that goes along with that, and may have coined a few of them myself. But the truth is that those things simply are not my deepest awareness of myself all of the time.
I swear to you, sometimes I just want to quit, and have just had enough. One does not exactly become Scrooge McDuck by challenging people to think outside of the boundaries of the comfortable, but one does accumulate a vault filled with hate mail, personal attacks, and the like, which they find themselves swimming in far more often than they’d wish. Some days that sort of constant sock in the gut, coupled with the lack of reward, is all that I’m aware of, and all I’d like to do is give up.
On those days, my deepest awareness of myself is my own weakness; my own inadequacy.
But while my deepest awareness might not exactly be in line with God’s, it is still his awareness that remains true. The truest thing about me is that I am, in spite of and in light of everything else, deeply loved by something, someone, beyond me. I am caught up in a dance that has been shaking the foundations of the cosmos since their creation. I live within an embrace that I did nothing to earn an invitation into, and I daily inhale an atmosphere that first exhaled me, in love, into being.
That is the truth that I’m rarely aware of, but am constantly saved by. If its truth depended on my awareness, I would be damned, and to be pitied above all. I would be without hope or salvation in this world. If my head always had to be on straight, in the game, and thinking in perfect agreement with a God whom I’ve yet to even catch a true glimpse of, I’d might as well check out now.
But it’s not based on what I know. It *is*, even if I feel it isn’t. It’s reality, even when I’m feeling suffocated by an alternate one.
And that’s Good News.
If you’ve been told that you must *know* in order for the truth to be made true, you’ve been told a lie. The deepest truth about you remains true even if you haven’t the strength to stand in the midst of it, or believe it.
And thank God for that.
Jeff Turner
