What about Crap?

What about the junk we all have inside ourselves?  Doesn’t apply to you?  I encourage you to find a blog for non-humans.  I don’t mean to be specist (which is a word I invented that goes one step beyond racist) but this is a human-only issue.  

Confession:  I've had a quiet goal for my whole life to not ever actually need grace.  I’m too proud.  I've wanted to be able to bask in the acknowledgement that I didn't need "corners cut" for me  My, my.  What a costly and foolish mental framework to try to maintain.  

All of this is why I've had only a very little personal attachment to the idea of forgiveness until the last few years.  I had been a resource "other people" needed.  Any talk of God's "amazing grace", which I accepted in principle, was something I considered from a distance, thinking, "Isn't it so wonderful that God will give so generously to 'other people' who 'need it'".

The bliss of ignorance, however, came at a heavy price.  The idea of having it all together became far too costly and sketchy to maintain.  It required a degree of personal dishonesty that began to spread to other areas of my life.  In other words:  it was full of crap and time for something new.

Now I am a "togetherness" cynic.  I don't really believe it exists in large enough quantities for any of us to not need grace – or some other way to deal with “junk”.  If we're deeply honest, I think we all have secrets we'd gladly go to hell just to keep to ourselves.  (Sure, that's extreme language, but it's also reflective of the level of shame possible when you get really honest about your deepest motives).

All of this creates a bit of a situation.  How can we have a functional sense of identity when some parts of us are such a frightening, twisted secret?  It seems to me that you can either deny your junk and try to keep the ruse of togetherness in tact or you need some other mechanism.  Not many of us can simply admit, “I’m an animal” and leave it that.

I think what we really need is to have our junk "cancelled".  "Stopped" is a bucket of fool's gold.  Promise yourself "never again" and watch what happens.  Every "never" is followed by a "next":  you say "never again" and then go on to the "next" time you do it.

"Cancelled" is my only viable option because I just can’t “quit”.  To live in denial is to be held hostage by your deepest secrets.  But to acknowledge your "junk" may be one step worse because the guilt you didn't know about becomes the shame you do know about.  And one step further, the shame you do know about can become despair when we start to lose hope.  

Which is what makes forgiveness such a necessary and incredible thing.  It is the central shock of ancient Christianity that you can acknowledge your twisted secret and then have it cancelled.  I don’t want to embellish that lest I make the concept perfect for my own thinking and useless for yours.  It’s a mystery.  It’s a mess.  It’s a contradiction.  It’s also true (I believe, anyway).  My crap’s cancelled.

So...  If you have the courage to find an objective voice about yourself, gaze into your deepest secrets and accept that they are no surprise to God, then and only than can you truly appreciate the explosive ramifications of the statement, "I am forgiven".

And I am so glad I am.