Sigh...

Any of the three would have done; they were all clever and persuasive and illustrated Important Things, neatly tied to Interesting Real-Life situations. Anyone could find relate-able material in them, thoughtful stuff, with just the right-sized dollop of Proper Theology. There would have been good responses that kept my ego happily stroked and smoothed, and nobody could see a thing wrong with what I'd written. Except me. And God.

For considered properly, each of the three draft pieces I wrote was really just bitchery--paying off old scores, settling accounts with people who had hurt me. I'm tolerably insightful and very good with words, so I could nicely veil what I was up to--from others, perhaps, but not from myself. Or God. So I can't use three quite tidy bits of writing, because they might be cute, but they aren't Christian.

I repeat: sigh

Of course it's easier for me to look at others' failings than at my own life. My own life, to me, looks so hopelessly unmanageable, full of very real and important and (sometimes) scary lapses and wrong commissions that I cannot for the life of me seem to correct. Thinking of my soul as a house: however much I exhaust myself trying, I can't even keep the place tidy, much less clean. Much easier to visit someone else's house, running my white-gloved fingertip over the top of the doors and imagining what's shut in the hall cupboard, than to deal with the fetid mess under my own refrigerator.

I begin to realize that when the Pharisee was muttering over his list of perfections, while sneering at the tax collector over there in the corner, maybe the Pharisee wasn't being a self-righteous religious perfectionist. Maybe he was just feeling nervous. Maybe he felt that he had to buy God's love, because he sure as hell didn't deserve it for just being himself. If so, we're mostly with the Pharisee.

But we know at a deeper, profoundly uneasy-making level that however we try, ultimately God can't be bought. Like it or lump it, we are all (if we have any sense) uneasily aware that God could find quite a number of holes to pick with us, if God chose to. Technically, we may believe in God's grace and peace and love, but on the whole, we've usually had a lot more experience with the hole-picking process than we've had with being honestly seen and loved and accepted, just as we are, fleas and all.

Which is probably why we're so obsessed with our own and other's misdoings. We are dimly aware of God's power to judge, and we assume that God's going to be just as judgmental about us as we are about everyone in earshot. We just want to remind God that the person over there has LOTS of holes to pick, in the hope that God may get so busy with the other guy that He'll forget about us.

But then, there's eternity....won't work. Not in the very long term, anyway. If God wants to pick holes, not one of us isn't in big, big trouble, Mother Teresa included.

sigh

But there is another way, and it's the way we have ... well, belief in at some times, faith in at some times, hope often, absolute certainty rarely, because the prospect is so breathtaking that we can't wrap our human heads around it: that God has decided to give up on picking holes at all. That as He once promised never to destroy His creation, so He promises through Christ never to hold us up to a standard none of us can meet, and never to judge us by a Law that none of us can possibly keep.

We have the assurance through Christ that God does love us exactly as we are, although He doesn't always like how we behave. The worst effects of sin are, in fact, on our relationships with each other, and the effects can be horripilating. What God offers is steady, unblinking forgiveness--not blindness; forgiveness. What God wants from us in return is a simple decision: are we going to accept forgiveness or not? Because in fact we usually do turn away from it, either because we figure we can't possible deserve it (true!) or because we don't want to admit that we've done anything that needs forgiving.

It's that knowledge of the Law--what God expects of me in my writing, at its and my best--that makes me look at those three pieces and think "These won't do." There is a standard set for me in this work, and it's my job to meet it; if I miss the mark, it's my job, through my understanding of the standard and through the Holy Spirit at work in me, to know I've missed the mark. Those three draft pieces might be clever bits of work, and I may yet recycle the good ideas in them in less bitchy ways, but for now--no. Into the trash bin, one, two three.

I can't make myself be a Perfectly Good Person, any more than I can reduce my house-mess to Martha-Stewart-like Gracious Living , although, with much effort, I can keep us all from tumbling into total squalor. I am and will always be too human, too sloppy, too quick to feel hurt and too slow to forgive. But I can decide that these pieces I write are not a place for me to pay off any private scores. That's a small resolution, not too hard to keep, one that puts to death for God's sweet sake one small part of my own particular messy human nature.

Still, they were good pieces...

(Romans 8.14-25)
For BBW