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I am afraid. It’s been going on for some time now, but I just now realized it because I’m a newbie to this feeling. All my life I’ve lived fearlessly, without regard to personal consequences, at least regarding major life decisions–where to live, what job to take, what insurance to buy. Being single, I had no one to answer to, no one whose life would be affected by the turns I took–right or wrong–no one I had to look out for. It wasn’t from a confidence in my success, but in a stubborn disdain of worst case scenarios–I’d do fine sleeping on the street and scrounging food out of the garbage. What’s the big deal?
I had a whole way of doing life that was completely sustainable when I was on my own. Then I got married. to a person who has a very different approach to life and money and jobs and everything. She is not high maintenance at all, but she would be unhappy sleeping in an abandoned storefront and eating dumpster Dominos. So we have to aim a little higher and actually consider risk. I fear that if I push for us to take a big risk and it fails, whether it collapses suddenly or through years of decay (both of which have their own unique awfulness), I will be at fault.
And we are both spent emotionally. We have very little psychic capital to use on new adventures, and if we get half-way in and run out of initiative, or the route ends up being twice as long or twice as difficult as we had planned in rationing our energy, or the road we take is a dead-end and we run out of both money and options, or….
What she needs to sustain her life is quite different from what I need. As just one example, the kind of work I have is far more important to me, and the environment we live in is far more important to her. We have very different needs for stability, security, community, challenge, and everything else. But with limited funds, our needs can be in direct competition. If we must sacrifice, how do we divvy that up? It is not an incidental wish list for either of us, but a question of sustainable living. Should she be miserable or should I? (Which is not a genuine question, because if either of us is miserable, we both are. That’s the nature of love.) How do you measure the respective burdens? Or should one of us be miserable in the short term so we can get to a better place? How miserable? Because a certain level of misery is not sustainable even in the short term… and what is “short term”… and what if it takes longer to get to a better place? AAArrrgh!
I see we have a big discussion ahead of us. At least I now know what it is about.
When I stepped through the gate of adulthood, I turned the wrong direction, and with the best of intentions, trudged deeper and deeper into the wilderness. I should have gone into teaching Bible or Theology–it was my gift and my joy–but I was told that missionary evangelism was God’s real calling. At the age of 40 I discovered my whole worldview was cracked, and I started over, trying to understand life from the viewpoint of grace. I did my best to recalibrate my life’s occupational trajectory, but seemed to keep getting it wrong. I tried pastoring, then social work, and though they were both fulfilling, the structure in each demanded that I deny my true self in order to succeed. In the end, I was forced to leave because the pressure to conform was too great for me to bear, and I began to languish.
I was deep into midlife when I ran out of meaningful work and had to settle for something uninspiring that would meet our basic expenses. That has proven harder than expected. All my education and experience is of no use to land a professional job in another field. I now realize I have to get more training or education just to find work that will cover our simple lifestyle (almost half my wages now go to health insurance alone), and that means years of effort and tens of thousands of dollars in costs just to start applying for jobs… jobs I may hate after all the effort.
Becoming a college teacher would require a Ph.D., and there is a huge market surplus of competition to contend with, and I would be in my 60s and just starting out, a very dire prospect. Since becoming an electrician or plumber would take just as much time and money as other professions (yes, I looked into it), I have been thinking of getting my M.A. in counseling (since my other joy in life is connecting redemptively in a deep way with others). I haven’t done well so far in every effort to reconfigure my life, so this too could be a misadventure. We are thinking and praying.
We Americans are strikingly individualistic, even inventing self-contradictory proverbs to make our point. “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” we say as though sheer effort can somehow overturn the law of gravity. This outlook even molds our view of spirituality, which we see as something personal and private, between me and God. We turn what is quintessentially a collective, integrated, synergistic venture–the church–into a gathering of individuals, largely disconnected personally. Henry doesn’t know that John’s marriage is crumbling or that Karen’s fifth grader is desperately struggling with depression.
This individualistic mindset is especially detrimental to grace. Grace, like patty-cakes, is not something we can do on our own. It is not something we “claim,” but something we are given… there must be another to offer us grace. Gifts are never earned or won or conquered or they would cease to be gifts. It is true that all grace originates with God, but his primary means of delivering that grace to us is through people. We are all bearers of his light of grace, sharing our small, flickering flame with those whose wick has whiffed out. God came down to us once in flesh that could touch and hear and comfort us, but that was 2000 years ago, and since then, his body has taken on the form of our fellow humans.
This it at once a great responsibility and an amazing privilege–to be the voice and hands and heart of God to our fellows, and them to us. None of us do it perfectly, perhaps not even particularly well, but we each have an indispensable role to play in the redemptive journey we are all on together. We depend on each other for our core heart needs to be met, and we suffer deeply when we cannot connect in mutually supportive relationships. Failing those redemptive relationships, we must do our best to welcome with hope those small tastes of it, the little gestures of goodwill that come our way.
I am not a gracious person by nature. Among other flaws, I have a strong undertow of anger that side-eyes anyone who steps outside the bounds. Just yesterday I accelerated from a stop light and then slowed into the left turn lane when a car darted out from a gas station to my left, forcing me to swerve. He was trying to beat the traffic coming the opposite way, no doubt expecting me to keep accelerating so that he could swing in behind me. He stopped, straddling lanes in both directions, and as I passed, I raised my hand at him and mouthed “WHAT?!”
As much as I treasure grace, it is not my default. My go-to is still legalism and anger and judgment. They are reflexive both in me and at others, and I have to talk myself out of it, like explaining for the hundredth time to a child why he shouldn’t chase the ball into the street. It takes hundreds of explanations not because he misunderstands or disagrees, but because in that moment he’s fixated on the ball. Unfortunately, some undercurrents in us are more complex or more rooted or more hidden. Anger and blame were a moral right in our family when I was growing up so I don’t even have that self-conscious check in my spirit–it doesn’t feel wrong. It wasn’t baked into my conscience as guilt inducing… or rather it was baked into my conscience as legitimate and righteous, unless it is excessive.
But if I conclude that my problem is simply an excess–that irritation is okay, but not spitting–then legalism wins. I reduce everything to behavior and never bother to ask the vital question, “Why do I feel so angry?” My anger or my expression of it is not the real problem, but the symptom, like a check engine light.
In this case, the diagnosis is complex. I have bought into a legalistic system in which we all live within certain parameters, and we keep one another in line by penalizing line-breakers: shirkers, cheaters, moochers, and bad drivers. I work hard to stay within the lines, knowing the whole system will collapse if we don’t all conform, so I am heavily invested in everyone following the rules.
I’m not curious about why they cross the line. Perhaps they lay down the lines differently or they are dodging the opposite line or they don’t prioritize this line. Maybe they are struggling too much to care about lines. All of that looks like so many bad excuses to me–get back in line and then we’ll talk about your issues. This overriding sense of legalistic suppression comes out against myself also in self-condemnation for crossing lines, especially if it hurts or inconveniences others.
I absorbed my dad’s view that it was personally insulting for someone to cross the line in a way that blocked our goals or intentions. It showed that they disrespected us, not caring how their behavior impacted us, which poked at our insecurity in our behavior-based worth. Since we were unaware of our anger except under occasional provocations, we blamed the other for “making us angry” as though anger came from outside and not from within as self-defense against a perceived slight. Seen empathetically, my anger is a cry of fear that my very worth is being threatened by every assumed mistreatment–I must judge you to deflect my own sense of inadequacy.
Sadly, it is this very judging that maintains the legalistic system that keeps me running from my shame and away from grace. Not only when I am mean, but every time I do something stupid or careless or off-kilter, I shame myself into better efforts because I am sure that doing it right is the measure of my worth. And with that system, I judge the worth of others by what they do. We are all trapped, and keep each other trapped, like crabs in a bucket that keep pulling down the ones trying to escape. Grace is all of a piece–we all get it or none of us do. When we start measuring out who is “worthy” of grace, we have slipped back into legalism again. So giving grace to other drivers (or neighbors or colleagues), real grace, not forced and grudging but free and affirming, is my best path to accepting grace for myself as well. Let grace reign.
- Establishing an environment of grace. Unless someone feels safe to share and explore their own viewpoints with a non-judgmental and supportive listener, they cannot be honest even with themselves, and especially not with the other person. This is quite tricky in close relationships because we get enmeshed in our own issues, are blind to our underlying assumptions, and confuse support with other problematic responses (such as the tendency to ‘fix’ or rescue or diagnose). It can get messy–sometimes the focus must switch from the original topic to the current hurtful dynamic–but if we keep flailing towards the goal, we will learn a little through each encounter.
- Sharing vulnerably. We can only share vulnerably in an environment made safe by grace, but unless we share the things that we guard most closely to our hearts, we cannot go very deep in relationship and mutual understanding. It is our fear, often stoked by self-condemnation, that prevents us from sharing at the level that breaks through the surface to the core of ourselves. Sometimes this fear leaks out as sarcasm, blame-shifting, or other ways of self-protection. Vulnerability is especially hard if the listener incites these fears so that they react to our sharing in self-defense. Sometimes a third-party can help in “translation.”
- Supporting ourselves. We cannot make the other person responsible for our safety or support, which is a subtle form of co-dependence. This means I must go at my own pace in self-revelation, not risking more than I can bear in vulnerability. Of course I can be aided in this effort by the listener, by their gentleness, affirmation, and support, but ultimately I must stand up for myself by establishing healthy boundaries and a pace and level of vulnerable sharing that is sustainable.
- Sharing responsibility. It is not possible to go deep in relationship with someone who is unwilling or unable to respond in kind. Vulnerability must match vulnerability, depth match depth, grace match grace. Of course any of these may come more easily to one party, so it is the effort or commitment of each that is matched, not the content. A person may value self-discovery enough to share in a one-sided way, but if it is not matched, it does not deepen real relationship.
- Giving mutual respect. When one position is privileged over the other, it becomes very difficult to find any insight that does not simply support and expand that perception. If one person is presumed to be “right” because of greater experience, insight, knowledge, etc. or because of accepted norms, the process will be undermined. The experiences, feelings, and viewpoints of both parties must be accepted as equally valid–after all, the key does not lie in these perceptions, but in what underlies them, and we cannot reach these hidden roots unless we are sympathetic to what is shows above ground. This is as true for ourselves as for the other–out of hand dismissal or critique will kill the process. (We also have no basis for judging without understanding these foundations). This openness is not easy to do, especially if one is more assertive than the other, but real understanding depends on it.
- Discerning Subconscious systems. The focus is always on deeper understanding, discovering the root system beliefs that establish our conscious behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. This means working to understand the subconscious presuppositions from which our feelings and views flow, otherwise we are stuck on the surface, unable to grow personally and relationally in transformational ways. The question “Why?” repeated (like two-year-olds!) at deeper and deeper levels is key to this process until a whole integrated system is revealed: values, priorities, fears, safety nets, and the like.
- Identifying family-of-origin values and dynamics. This is a huge asset in self-discovery. The most profound and opaque engine of our viewpoint is how we were raised, not the actual teaching of values (though that also counts), but the unspoken and unrecognized values out of which the relational dynamics were formed.
- Placing our role in the family. After we begin to discover the overall picture, we begin to see how we fit into that schema–were we compliant or rebellious? Over what issues? Did we take more after our mother or father? Regarding which values and with what impact on ourselves and our family relationships? How did our siblings impact us and the family dynamics? What did we hide from our families and why? Who were we closest to (or fearful of) and why?
- Understanding our personalities. Our families’ values are filtered into and out of us through our unique personalities. We may be confident or doubtful, introverted or extroverted, pensive or active, cautious or adventurous, and each aspect causes us to respond to family values in different ways. Our personality has a huge impact on our belief structures, self-perception, and relational patterns.
- Being patient with the process. The more foreign to our minds or objectionable and threatening to our thoughts and feelings, the more the effort required and the longer the time frame to reach a new level of discernment. All explanations are tentative until a system begins to form through repetitive confirming discoveries. Our hearts can only go at a certain speed and to push them to go faster will undermine the process. It is the most difficult conflicts in our relationship that touch our most important beliefs, so these are key, but we may have to gradually work up to them.
- Using coping strategies in a healthy way. Our coping mechanisms (people-pleasing, controlling, withdrawing, etc.) are crutches to help us heal. They protect us from too much vulnerability that would set us back in our growth process. But if we use them to avoid growth, our spiritual muscles atrophy, our personal and relational growth is stunted. We need to push ourselves into what is uncomfortable, challenging, even scary, but not so far that we injure ourselves by pushing past our sustainable limits. Most importantly we should recognize when we are using coping mechanisms and why–be conscious, deliberate, and strategic in their use rather than slipping into them by default without noticing.
- Finding support. There are many sources of support and direction for this process: books, podcasts, friends, counselors, self-reflection, exercises, etc. Support may come from the relationship in question, but often there is so much tension there when discussing conflicting feelings and views that outside support is needed. Pseudo-support is especially dangerous, posing as “for your good,” but ending up making us feel worse about ourselves (or feeling better like an opioid). With less support, the process will take longer.
Dad died a year ago last Friday. His passing was not an emotional jolt for me since I had spent a decade grieving the loss of our relationship. My father could not follow me on my journey of genuine self-discovery over the last twenty years. He tried as best he could to understand me, but always on his own terms, trying to fit me into his mental constructs with slight alterations–a more melancholy and ardent version of himself perhaps. He instinctively knew, I think, that really opening himself to see things from my perspective would require a complete re-orientation of his own perspective and that was too radical for his carefully organized worldview.
His is a common human problem. The first year of marriage was a huge struggle for me for the same reason–that my worldview made sense and Kimberly’s did not. I tried listening to her and incorporating aspects of her perspective–trying to be more gentle and supportive, less critical and angry, tweek my worldview with cosmetic changes without moving any load-bearing walls. I kept listening to her explain her struggle in our relationship, and I kept trying to adapt my behavior and avoid or use certain words while hiding certain attitudes. I was basically saying to myself, “My worldview needs no adjustments, but out of love I will accommodate her weaknesses.” It didn’t work.
Relational accommodation, making room for someone else’s differences, is much more loving than rejecting them as somehow “wrong,” but it is a truncated love. When I continue to see others from my own perspective rather than trying to see with their eyes and understand them from within their experience, I cannot understand them in any deep way. The relationship cannot be fundamentally supportive or transformational, but only touches the surface. Our interdependence “being members of one another” is so much more than sharing our spiritual gifts. Our interdependence goes to the core of who we are. We need the corrective of the other’s point of view.
Most of us are willing to tweak our life map, add a street or railroad that is missing. “Oh, I didn’t know that,” we say. It is the natural process of learning. As long as no one fiddles with the major features of our map, we won’t feel too defensive when they suggest changes because we basically have the “right” orientation. But if the differences in our maps are profound–mine shows a grid of city streets where yours shows winding country roads–then we have no easy solution. My initial reaction, emotionally and intellectually, is to reject your map, to assume you are wrong, confused, or misguided. When my father first heard I was struggling with depression, he was concerned and sent me a book that stated in the introduction, “Depression comes from a lack of faith.” Thankfully, he did not stick with that perspective.
The next step in a positive direction is for me to stop rejecting your map as defective and simply assert that our views are incompatible and so we cannot understand one another. The third step (with a smidgen of humility) is to see how I might learn from you, fit some features of the your map into mine, add a river here or a corner store there… but a river going through the center of a city, polluted and obstructing traffic, is very different from a river that is bordered by meadows. When I squeeze this element into my map, the whole essence of it is changed. I have distorted your view to fit my own, and though I may speak of a river, we see it so differently that we still cannot understand one another. How you experience that river is completely shaped by your overall map, and until I can see that, I am blind to who you are. “Okay,” I say to myself, “He likes pollution and traffic jams. To each his own.” Dad came this far with me on my journey, acknowledging that it was possible to be full of the Spirit and still suffer depression, though he could not conceive how that fit into his own theological framework, he at least allowed for it, a kind of exception to the rule.
But he was never able to get past this stage with me. I spent years trying to explain to him my own experience and how I was coming to realize that his map of life did not work for me, but he always saw my experience as an aberration from the norm. He was convinced that his theology and spirituality and values were spot-on and needed only slight tweaking to accommodate people like myself, maybe add a mission hospital to his map for that small segment of broken people like myself. He instinctively knew that to open his worldview to my experience–using it to challenge his worldview instead of adding it as an addendum–would mean a complete revision of his thinking, a worldview that he had spent a lifetime perfecting and promoting through his preaching, teaching, and writing. And thousands of testimonials proved that his worldview worked… at least for those who found it beneficial.
So I spent the last years of his life slowly accepting the painful reality that my own father would never know me, that our relationship would never get past the superficial. In many ways it was like my mom’s slow decline into Alzheimer’s when she eventually did not know who I was or even that I was in the room. Trapped inside her own mind, she could not relate to us. That long grieving process seems to me more gentle on those left behind than a sudden death of an intimate. Truly here “we see in a glass, darkly.” We let them go with the joyful expectation that when we embrace them again all the obstacles to our relationships will be gone, and we will “know even as we are known.”
Postlude: Kimberly tells me no one will understand what I have said without an example. So let me very briefly point out one serious difference in our maps. Dad, being a choleric, grounded spiritual growth in behavioral choices and made God responsible for his subconscious mind–if he was not aware of it, he was not responsible for it. As a result, he tended to see emotions as secondary to our spiritual lives. This might work for people who are less self-reflective, but it is a scheme that is largely unworkable for us melancholics who are in touch with a great part of the tides of our hearts. If dad had been able to fully accept this discrepancy, he would have had to rework his whole paradigm of spiritual growth, either suggesting different processes for different people or working out a new approach that fully incorporated the processes of those different from him. This is a very tall order for anyone, especially in the latter part of our lives, so I do not mean to fault him for it. He quite possibly did the best he could with what he had–and we cannot ask for more. I only share this as an encouragement for us all to work at broadening our viewpoints.
The air was crisp and cool this morning, which is odd for late May in the south. The sun poked its head through the clouds for the first time in a week and invited me to come enjoy it, so I packed up the dogs and headed for the Blue Ridge Parkway. Once the sun had tricked me outside, he decided his work was done for the day and tugged the clouds back over his head to get some shut-eye. The first pull-off had only three parked cars (it often has 8-9), and since a passing trail and gravel road offered four hiking directions, I figured the odds were good for avoiding folks, an introvert’s prerequisite for enjoying nature. As I was leashing up the dogs, another car pulled up behind us.
They might take the trail or the gravel road either direction, so the odds were with us as we headed south on the road. Even if they came our way, they might be mountain bikers or joggers that would soon pass us and be gone, but just in case, we set out at a brisk pace. We were a block ahead when I turned and saw the couple following, also at a quick stride, and I could hear their loud chatter. Oh, this is going to ruin our walk, I grumbled, and set off running down the road in my hiking boots to put a quarter mile of quiet between us. That worked fine until Mazie went into search mode for the ideal poop spot. After several failed forays and body positions, she found her sweet spot, but by then I could hear several low phlegm-clearing harrumphs followed by his partner’s high-pitched gossip. We had just passed a fork in the road, so I stood waiting to see which direction they would take, and when they came our way, we promptly turned back to take the other fork.
Problem solved. My soul just started to settle into the peace of nature when I heard the distinct “crunch, crunch” of feet on the gravel behind us, and a loud voice calling out, “Well, HELLO!” Like we were long lost relatives. I half-turned to mutter “hey” at a volume I’m sure she couldn’t hear, and then it began, “Isn’t it great to be able to get out after all that rain?!” This was said at our backs before she had jogged up to us, but as she pulled level she slowed her jog to match my quick walk, commenting on my cute dogs and the weather. In desperation I slowed down and then stood still, and her momentum carried her forward enough to break the easy flow of her monologue. She kept jogging, and I muttered, “I’ll never take this road again!”
For full-on extroverts, talking is the only real and meaningful activity and everything else, including nature’s beauty, is so much background noise… for the hard-core, even the other person’s voice is background noise. Of course, it is only their vocalization which makes them differ from the rest of us who chatter incessantly in our own brains. I’ve ruined enough of my solitary walks with an agitated spirit to recognize my own tendency to drown out the soul-nourishing present moment with my internal dialogue. It is hard enough to contend with the voices in my own head without adding the jibber-jabber of strangers. This is why we introverts seek solitude.
I drove to work after my last blog with my soul percolating in anticipatory tension. Patience on the road is not my strong suit anyway. I was gunning, braking, and swerving my way down the freeway, muttering about all the stupid and pigheaded folks who drove in the left lane as if they were the lead car in a funeral procession, when I realized my adrenaline rush was going to turn the workplace into a war zone. I pulled into the right lane to settle down and set my heart in a better direction to cope with the fire-sale crowds at the paint counter.
Fearing the impatience of my customers made me defensively more impatient with my fellow drivers. When I accept impatience towards me as legitimate, internalize that criticism as justified and blame myself as inadequate, I become a shareholder in a legalistic system, and with that system, I justify my own impatience towards others. Slowness, incompetence, and bungling are never in themselves cause for incrimination. We tend to see these as willful negligence, an intentional disregard, because we are frustrated and looking for someone to blame. But the court of our mind cries out for consistency so that we must also blame ourselves when our missteps impede others’ plans.
In this way results, not intentions, become the basis for judgment, and we buy into a distinctly American morality that sees success as the inevitable reward of diligence and hard work. Mistakes, especially repeated mistakes, are the sign of moral decay or personal defect. We offer “grace” for a certain level of deficiency and stuff down our impatience, but cross that line and we pull out our corrective ruler to slap your hand for not living up to our expectations. Yet grace that fits within a quota is not real grace, which is endless, and its goal is not meeting expectations, but giving us the fullest life possible.
Unfortunately, like all forms of legalism, impatience used by us or against us is all of one piece, mutually reinforcing. My impatience towards others forces me to accept their impatience towards me and vice versa. If I do not live in a world of self-deception in which I am the definer of what expectations are legitimate (namely the ones I meet), then I live in world in which I am always trying to validate my worth. I am driven to perfectionism in which I am my own worst accuser, and my only defense is to pull others to my level by pointing out their failures.
Our society is constantly reinforcing this legalistic worldview. Each time I make a mistake in mixing paint, I feel like I need to somehow justify myself or prove to my supervisor that I have constructed a system to avoid that mistake in the future. But I am human. I get distracted or confused. In the hubbub I forget to take necessary precautions. I will keep making mistakes, and I need to find a way to support myself in my own mind, to be patient with myself. Remarkably, I find that leaning into grace for myself helps me lean into grace for others as well. And when I use my impatience of others to confront my own legalistic worldview and push myself back towards a grace perspective, it rebounds to an easier grasp of grace towards myself.
I think I need to spend more time in the slow lane.
Today is my eighth day at work without a break and, unfortunately, the first day of our annual paint sale that brings out the hoards. Old timers tell me there will be long lines of impatient customers as we all work madly to mix the colors. This is not my idea of fun. Performance expectations are my kryptonite. When there are only two customers waiting for me, I begin to grow anxious and tense. I dash from one station to another–product shelf to paint mixer to shaker to dryer, prying open one can while tabbing on the computer for another. I tend to make mistakes, which cranks up the volume on my anxiety, and my self-condemnation meter starts to vibrate.
So here I am preparing to go to work, knowing my core issues will be flayed for the next eight hours. I hate that my only path to greater health is an emotional gauntlet right smack through the middle of my issues. I’d much prefer to avoid them–get a less demanding job for instance. I’d rather read about how to overcome them in a book, and even take a test. I’m a good test-taker. I’d probably score 100%. Why is it always on-the-job training I need? At least if I could get a breather to center myself… but taking a break while long lines wait for my colleagues would only make me more stressed. And, Lord, don’t over-estimate my capabilities–I’m not ready for someone to call out sick today!
It seems the challenges to my issues keep pace with my growth, always one step harder. My prayers as I flail in the rising waters of customer frustration devolve from, “help me be peaceful” to “help me just survive” to “Help!” If maintaining my peace is an “A” for the test, then making it through without growling in self-defensive anger may be a passing grade? I’ll take what I can get at this point. The wise teachers try to calm me down by saying, “It’s all a process.” Yeah? Well, so is drowning!
May you all have a blessed, trouble-free day… at least may it be better than mine.
So God made us out of dust and breathed life into us, which I suppose makes us dirt balloons (and he clearly puffed more into some of us than others). Poetic souls try to inflate our worth by calling us “star dust,” but that Disney image is just lip gloss smeared on mud bubbles. If we are made from star pieces, we didn’t get any of their sparkle and shine–they kept that for themselves–so at most we are the burned up stuff, star effluvia. Yes, we are star poop if that makes you feel any better. We’re just mud pies, which makes us a few grades lower than gingerbread men.
Clearly God wanted to keep us humble, to show us where we came from so we wouldn’t be putting on airs and instead realize the air that animates us is from God’s breath, not our atoms. I mean, the angels must elbow each other watching us mud clods strutting our stuff until we all get swept out the back door together. “For you are dust and to dust you will return.”
It is our inflated sense of self that God wants to prick by reminding us of our origins. He values us immensely, but it has nothing to do with our inherent value, which is about $4.50 in chemical elements according to Mayo clinic. As demeaning as all that sounds, it is actually amazingly freeing and safe. We are not loved because we are wonderful, but because God is wonderful. We don’t have to do anything to be valued by God. He is not waiting for us dirt balls to become disco balls before he values us, but he loves us fully as we are, Pigpen as much as Linus, and that should make even Charlie Brown dance.
Janathan Grace Reflections 