The Ugly Truth

Honestly, life's been kicking the pants off me lately. We're busy, like lots of people, and I tend to be a really focused person...as in too many things at one time makes me a crazy person. Lately, I've been a crazy person.

Being task driven, this means that I still get a lot of work done, but, as I always remind my eager-to-please-people husband, "When you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else."

Well, I like to say yes to tasks. I like to feel a little bit of pressure pressing down on my shoulders--to know that I am taking on a challenge and feel the satisfaction in its completion. I love crossing things off of my to-do list and can get lost in the job for hours on end.

But, saying yes to tasks means I have to say no to something else. Often, what suffers is my relationships, because I only have so much extroverted energy to go around. So, on the outside I'm burning through task lists and on the inside I'm one big ball of ugly.

Usually it's the husband and child that catch the brunt of this. I'm snippy and impatient and lack a generous spirit. This week, the ugly leaked out beyond the confines of the family. It's hard to hide the truth when that happens.

This week I came face to face with the ugly, unloving, and impatient me that has built up inside of my outwardly productive body and this truth smacked me in the face (for what feels like the thousandth time--apparently I'm a very slow learner): It's not OK to trade productivity for love. In fact, its not only not OK, it's completely antithetical to everything I want my life to be about.

1 Corinthians 13 came to mind as I have been processing my inner ugliness:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

¹³ So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

In other words: If I finish all my tasks and work countless hours in a day, but have not love...it's all a waste of time. It's humbling and re-prioritizing.

I've got some changes to make, and the first one is recognizing my constant need for Christ. My independent nature eventually always makes a mess of things and reveals that I cannot live my life in a way that matters without Him.

Praise God for His forgiveness and grace, and especially His love. May He give me those things in abundance so that I can live a life pleasing to Him.

Forgiveness

I am not quick to forgive.  I have, what my husband calls a "justice mentality," and what I have often called my "Holy Spirit complex."  I want right to be done, wrong to be vanquished and the truth to be proclaimed...and preferably in my favor. 

In my mind there is a right and a wrong, a winner and a loser.  And what has really driven me crazy in life is that I used to believe that whoever brings the most truth to the table "wins."  A few more years into life, however, I know that whoever brings the most crazy "wins."  That just doesn't seem right.  Add it to the list of injustices in the world.

I've spent a lot of time trying to force people to see the truth...sometimes actual truth and sometimes my own version, I suppose.  When they don't see it, it infuriates me.  It is even worse when I am personally hurt and not just pissed off at a more general injustice.

So, it's ironic that today I'm leading a devotion for some of our World Impact volunteers about forgiveness.  It covers the passage in Mark 2 where a paralytic is brought to Jesus by some crazy friends, who actually dig a hole in the roof of the building where Jesus is teaching and lower the paralyzed man down to Jesus for healing.  I'd have liked to be in that room and seen the first clod of dirt hit the floor.  People start looking at the ceiling in confusion as little by little more sunlight and dirt starts pouring into their eyes.  And then, all of a sudden, a man appears with four eager faces hovering over his still body.  But, then Jesus does something very odd (and to stand out as odd when there's suddenly a man hanging from the ceiling says something).  As the man's air-borne pallet hits the floor, He tells him his sins are forgiven. 

What a let down that must have been for the man, hoping and praying that his limbs would start to move!  I mean, imagine it!  You haven't walked in years, if ever, and you're waiting for some tingling sensation to start in your toes when, instead, you get your sins forgiven.  I'd have been disappointed.  You would have too, I think.

It's humbling, for an unforgiving person, to realize that in God's Kingdom forgiveness is of first importance.  Jesus does heal the man physically, but only after the important healing has already taken place.  His dancing legs were not what gave him his freedom that day.  Jesus' forgiveness did that.  So often I go to God and ask Him to be freed of an illness, or burden, or a hurtful or irritating person or situation, when what my heart is actually in need of is forgiveness...both to accept it and to be able to offer it.  Forgiveness brings peace and action to a world hung up in injustice.

Still, my justice oriented mind has a hard time wrapping itself around forgiveness.  I like there to be consequences when wrong is done.  Preferably swift and painful.  But then...there were consequences.  Someone did pay the price.  I may wish it was the blockhead who wounded and pissed me off, but instead it was a perfect, sinless Savior.  And He paid for my sins too.  "Big," "small," it doesn' matter.  Jesus hung on that cross with the force of every single sin.

Crap. That kind of takes the wind out of my prideful sails.  It certainly doesn't make it any easier to ask for and offer forgiveness, but it gives me the motivation to work on making forgiveness come first in my life...I have a long way to go.