Diagnosing my humanity

I have sometimes awoken to the bright crispness of a new day to find myself emotionally drained, lacking motivation to even get out of bed, because of a crushing weight of anxiety that seems to have seeped into my pores while I slept.

My first response to that feeling of despair is always to try and diagnose it. This must be caused by something, I think, so I wrack my brain for the root of the problem. Eventually I get so exhausted, so twisted up in my own thoughts, that all I can do is lie in bed and stare at the wall, letting negativity wash over me.

Every day we come up against things that threaten to bring out this despair in us—some external, some internal forces. Depression, strife in relationships, addiction, residual shame and guilt—all these are valid and potent forms of suffering. But we’re lying to ourselves if we identify these things as the cause of our problems.

Of course, pain manifests in different ways for everyone, but deep down any suffering—all suffering—is rooted in the simple fact of our hearts’ tendency to stray from God’s will. It is tempting and very human to see everyday pain itself as the ultimate source of discontentment in our lives—but this fixation causes us to seek short-lived solutions for chronic problems. The emptiness of our souls calls for a lasting fulfillment that can only be found by seeking God earnestly. No matter what the situation, our first response should always be to look to Him. For peace, for guidance, for forgiveness. For hope.

When I see that despair is not the root cause of my pain, but a symptom of my humanity, I can turn to God for comfort, who created me, who loves me, and whose boundless perfection covers all my shortcomings.

Where depression says: If only I could feel normal, then I could be strong, Jesus says: I will give you strength to endure even when the world seems to be crushing your spirit.

Where guilt says: Your mistakes will always haunt you, Jesus says: I have freed you if you trust in me.

Where disappointment says: Reject others before they have a chance to reject you, Jesus says: Lean into my love and you will be able to love others freely.

Where fear says: You can’t do this, Jesus says: You don’t have to do any of this alone.

When you feel the weight of despair looming over you, remember: it is but a temporary reflection of your humanity, your brokenness here on earth and your deep inner longing for relationship with the Creator. Our home is not here, in this world of contradictions and conflict—it is in God’s eternal, endless love, and the firmly rooted joy that He offers to all of us through His Son.

When Jesus died on the cross, He gave His life as the ultimate sacrifice to cover all sin. In Christ, I am free from the despair sin brings into my life. Justified by faith, sanctified by His blood, I have been imbued with an impenetrable joy and hope that renews me even as the world tries to tear me down.

On this earth we will have trials. We will face failure and guilt and pain. But we will never be truly defeated—for that assurance, the assurance of Jesus’ love, is the only salve for these mortal wounds.

“But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” -2 Corinthians 12:9

Graveyard poems

Decomposition

What do the dead become

in decomposition?

By definition, they are no longer

“they”

but something different, an expansion–

or is it a reduction?–

of molecules used

to feed the dust.

In feeding life, do the dead become it?

Is one what one nourishes?

Or do they lie, still

dead

only surrounded, permeated

perforated by life?

 

Reconstitution

Poems always find me in the cemetery.

Something in the smell of the earth

and ripeness of trees

contradicts the idea of a stagnant casket.

 

I imagine they speak to me,

voices muffled by silent air,

muttering truths they know now they’ve gone,

Death having pointed them

toward a greater Constant.

 

Try, they say,

to believe everything we didn’t.

This dust can only reanimate

our flesh and its nutrients–

the material stuff of ourselves,

not what lasts beyond. 

 

Their words stir a question

and I see it etched into the trees,

their silent beneficiaries:

If the earth brings bodies back to life,

who’s to say our souls can’t rise from dust

resurrected to light

by similar substance?

Our pain magnified

I have a tendency to avoid people.

I wouldn’t call it social anxiety, shyness, or self-consciousness, really. The sight of another person doesn’t induce panic throughout my nervous system. The more I live the more I actually come to love people—their complexities, their quirks. I love that they are, like me, flawed yet loved unconditionally by God.

That’s where I run into a problem, I think. People are flawed. And they will hurt you, purposefully and by accident, especially if you love them. So sometimes it’s easier to let them flow through your peripherals.

Care for no one, and they will never be able to hurt you. Love everyone, and you’ve basically given them all a clear shot at your heart. Because I have been loved and saved by God, I bear that love for those around me and want nothing more than to share it. But nothing cuts deeper than the inability to express the love of Christ to others fully and make them believe it, and watching them struggle without it.

This reality struck me pretty squarely recently when I serendipitously met two of my close friends while I was out walking. Truthfully, I considered avoiding them in my desire to brood on my own thoughts. I wasn’t ready for the news that they would share with me, which contained truly painful revelations about some of our mutual acquaintances. I left our conversation inexpressibly saddened by my new knowledge of our friends’ struggles and my own complete helplessness to address the problem. I continued my walk in turmoil, trying to wrap my mind around the seemingly impossible task of relinquishing my anxiety for them to God.

But one moment it hit me: the love I have for these people—the love that causes me to weep openly and despair when I hear of their pain—is but a minuscule reflection of the love that God has for every one of us, and a blurry one at that. I cried aloud in pain because of the suffering I saw in these two people’s lives, pain of which I could only see one dimension.

How much more acutely must God feel that despair, having such a minute and intricate view of everyone’s hearts.

But God never avoids us. In fact, He eagerly approaches us, offering us His own perfect and beautiful heart for the breaking. When Jesus came to the world, he took all the sin and death in it onto his own shoulders, determined to crucify it alongside himself.

Take a moment to impress on your mind the magnitude of that statement. He bore all the sin. All the hate, slander, anger, lies. All the death. All the loss, grief, confusion, sorrow.

All of it, from now until the end of time, was compressed into that single moment of Christ’s death on the cross.

I am so small, and I can scarcely bear my own struggles, let alone the burdens I accumulate by loving others. And yet the God I know is somehow tremendous enough, loving enough, courageous enough, merciful enough, to take not just my pain but everyone else’s and say, “Let me carry this so you won’t have to.”

Because that’s what He really wants. To take care of us.

God is at once present in this moment with you, understanding your precise struggles, and present in the same way with every other person on the planet. Our joys are his joys—multiplied. His pain is all our individual pains—magnified. What a God He is, who created us, knowing we would cause him such pain, yet loving us enough to endure all of it in the hopes that He would one day reach us.

De-stigmatizing sin

Too often as Christians, we allow the shame brought by sin and temptation to control us. We seek to hide our shortcomings from ourselves, from God, and from our fellow Christians, because we fear failure and judgement. We fear being branded with a scarlet letter, cast out by our friends, left behind by a disappointed God—and so we cower among the weeds of our guilt and shame, not realizing that the key to our freedom is the truth. The terrifying, beautiful truth.

We cannot successfully combat an enemy that we refuse to acknowledge. This is why, if the church wants to build a community that truly supports one another in the fight for truth, we must work to remove the stigma on sin and temptation. Not to accept these things as things we can’t or shouldn’t change, but to recognize that all of us struggle in unique ways, that temptation does not equate with sin, and that only by being open with ourselves, God, and each other about our struggles, can we truly begin to win the battle.

Our church communities will become more loving, more supportive, and closer to God’s design if we build on these truths:

1. Temptation is not sin. Even Jesus was tempted; one of the most miraculous things about Jesus is that He understands, on a personal level, the acuteness of temptation and its pervasiveness in our lives. But though Jesus was tempted, that temptation never resulted in sin. Temptation, therefore, or the pull we experience to disobey God, must be separate from sin. As Christians we must learn to stop punishing ourselves and each other for being tempted in certain ways; on the contrary, we should see temptation as an opportunity to choose God over ourselves by rejecting the worldly satisfaction it offers us. Not until we give in to temptation does it become sin.
2. Every person struggles with temptations and sinful habits that are at once uniquely personal and completely relatable. Sin comes into our lives as the result of our dissatisfaction with God, which everyone has in common. But we all experience temptation and sin in different ways, based on our own individual life experiences and inherent tendencies. Not everyone is inclined toward the same sin; some sins are more subtle, like unchecked pride, whereas some take a more prominent place in our lives, like an expression of sexuality that departs from God’s design. Every sin, though, comes as a result of us choosing, as we so often do, to follow ourselves rather than God.
3. For this reason, every sin is equally repugnant to God. No vice, no matter how it may seem to us in our human reasoning, is more or less acceptable in God’s eyes. Whenever we stray from God’s path, that is a betrayal of Him and His perfection. This is bad news, because it highlights how insufficient we are to save ourselves by our own merit; it is good news because though that is true, God’s plan was to save us and redeem us from the lives of sin we once led before coming to Him.
4. The church must rise to support its members with openness, passing no judgement on each other in the knowledge that judgement for all will come from God. We must create an environment in which sin is identified through the Word of God, and we must take on the attitude of Christ: to hate the sin, and love the sinner. We must encourage each other to confess our sins, and empower each other, through prayer and encouragement, to combat temptations that threaten to pull us away from God. We were never meant to fight these battles alone.

Healing begins with an open and honest diagnosis. And the miraculous thing is, in Christ we have a great Physician, who loves us and promises to meet all of our needs as we seek to follow Him