Grace and your Junk

It seems to me we have one of four choices when it comes to dysfunction:
 

(1) Live in denial. Believe in the myth of having it together.  Simply find a way to put an interpretive layer over top of who you are that leaves you completely oblivious of any junk that may or may not come from you.  Increasingly, I’m a “having it all together” cynic. I find it harder and harder to believe in the myth of special people.  I think it’s more about having the courage to really know yourself or not  I think it’s also about having the determination to pick through your own slanted perspective to find the ways you are kidding yourself.

(2) You can acknowledge your junk and live in shame.  What wonderful fun to spend your few years on earth lovingly licking your own wounds.  Whatever damage may have been done living in denial (see above) likely pales in comparison to the dysfunction that can come from acknowledging your own failure in ways that leave you isolated and alone.  

(3) You can acknowledge your junk and justify it.  Now we’re into a great, popular past time.  Find the worst part about you and then invent a reason not to change it.  “This is the way I am, the way I was made to be, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”  Well, how do you know?  It seems tremendously counter intuitive to identify a weakness only to further identify a reason why you should also learn to live with it.

(4) You can acknowledge your junk and get it cancelled. Acknowledging the worst part of you takes a courageous and objective voice.  If we’re really honest, most of us have one or a few twisted secrets we’d rather carry with us to the fires of hell than have them told.  

 
Acknowledgement is only the beginning, though (see numbers 2 and 3 above).  If that’s all you do, that’s not going to work.  Beyond acknowledgement, we need something more.  And that’s where “cancelled” comes in. I think the idea of “stopped” is a pile of fool’s gold.  Sure, there will be (and should be improvement), but I, for one, am sick of being pounded against the rocks of “you should be over this by now”. I live with my throttle pegged to the floor like most people, and I don’t need to be trashed about the extra capacity I haven’t found yet.
 
Only when you’ve honestly, deeply and objectively gazed at those twisted secrets without giving in to wound-licking shame or change-busting justification can you begin to grasp the explosive ramifications of this statement:  “I have been forgiven.”  My junk has been cancelled.  Parts of it may continue to trouble me, there may even be a relapse.  But it has been forever separated from my identity.  It’s something that’s touched me, but it doesn’t define me.  Sure it’s dirty – actually, it’s twisted and dirty – but it’s also been cancelled.  
 
What makes it powerful is the acknowledgement that precedes it, when you get to the place where you see (ever so clearly) how much you really needed it in the first place.  Do you think you might need it?