bleeds into 5, then 6, then delirium.
Can’t sleep. Whether it’s caffeine or the grip of frustration or regret I don’t know. I feel so much revulsion for the person I am.
How in the world can there be so much pride in a person? So much self centeredness and so much self righteousness, all the while denying its presence?
Careless careless careless are my lips and my heart. And in the dead of night I see and am so grievously repulsed.
—
Behind a curtain growing more translucent by the second.
The sound of the shovels penetrates the silence. Steel gnawing on pavement. Like nails on a chalkboard would this grating be to my ears if my heart was but lighter. Yet now it is cathartic.
The metal strains across ice and gravel, its rasp a fitting sound for the biting erosion of my pride, which I find has begun to calcify my heart once again. Night breaks into dawn. The sun in its piercing splendor will both expose and melt. And through the night, layer by layer in wearied human labor, the ice is scraped away.
And it is a nightly endeavor, or it must be, lest the ice remain until morn, treacherous in its immovability. Black ice. Of which we are oblivious until it is too late.
—
Up and down the street they drive. Scraping, scraping. And with each pass I fall deeper into lament as my pride is chipped away and tender self awareness emerges from the shards.
Replacing coddled self righteousness with the sting of revulsion for sin.
The world says to compare yourself not with others, but with the past you. Yet looking back, though I have learned much, changed much, it was not because I taught myself, or even first thought myself in desperate need of change.
My own conscious efforts were not what extended my limbs from my infancy. I have grown and developed as the course of time performed its natural work on my physiology. And I, in cooperation, feeding it.
I know deep down that although I have learned to better separate wisdom from folly, I am inherently fallible and would make the same foolish decisions once again, if I could. Or worse. In one moment I am strong, in the next my willpower is less than ash in the wind. And so I know I can neither attribute past growth to myself, nor depend on myself for future strength. For I am not my own, and my utter dependence on the cross is not a weakness but a sovereign assurance.
Yet not I but through Christ in me.
—
Am I different? Yes, and also no.
I am different because I have been worked on and am being sanctified by the Holy Spirit. And yet the part that was wholly my own — my human nature without God’s grace, who I was in the flesh. I am not different. And as long as I still retain my nature in that my sense of self remains in the flesh as it is on earth, I am sinful. That does not change.
Sinner made heir. Once, sin defined who I was. Yet now though I still sin, my Father defines who I am.
Sinner in the sense that I sin, daily without respite. Yet not a sinner because I have died with Christ and thus have been resurrected with him. Through the blood I am now a slave to righteousness. My identity in who Yahweh has told me I am, not in what I do, whether foolish or faithful or otherwise.
I am —
Sinful, yet still miraculously, Beloved.
