Day 7

Now I'm just blogging out of obligation. I said I'd blog every day (clearly a loose term) this year so that I could write more, but it has not be that successful.

Although ironically, I just finished writing my first paper of this quarter and talked about just that. That we need to accept our failures and talk about them. For most of my life I have tried to minimize my failures by either pretending they did not exist ("To what off-pitch are you referring? Certainly not my singing?), flowering over them ("Sorry I was a tad late. Happy birthday anyway. Yea, I know it was six months ago. That's why I said, happy half birthday."), or blaming someone else ("I was going to do the dishes but I was waiting on you to buy more dish soap.")

Clearly that's gotten me nowhere. And it completely disregards the idea of grace.

I sometimes wonder if we Christians ever truly accept the concept of grace at all.

A typical conversation can often look like this:
Mark: Hannah, did you do such-and-such?
Hannah: Oh, no Mark, I'm so sorry. I didn't.
Mark: Oh, that's ok. (Here's the grace part.)
Hannah: I'll try harder next time.

And that's the crux of it--trying harder. It makes it seem that we can actually achieve perfection if we just do more. Of course we cloak this in the idea of "becoming more like Christ" or "being imitators of Christ" or "being holy as I AM holy".

But frankly, we're basing our faith on works and not grace. Not that we shouldn't try or that we shouldn't seek to become holier, but we should sit in our failure some. We should recognize that we are failures and we're only human and we'll never BE Jesus. We'll never BE as holy as God.

We actually are failures. Any success we might experience is grace. It's embracing the truth: "I am a total failure. But despite that God loves me and He still uses me for His purposes."

But do not mistake me, I am not advocating absolute abandonment of our responsibilities and our promises. We must be honest about what we did not do that we said we would. But we can't actually take much credit for it when it does get done. Our choices are not isolated from the rest of the world--it's more complicated than that.

So the next tme you fail be honest about it, remember that you are imperfect and that's ok, and ask God to make a way for you to make it right.

And if all else fails, you might want to just write off this entire post. I feel a bit fuzzy in the noggin tonight.

Thank the Lord for His grace. I've failed and it's ok. I shall persevere not because I must prove myself to God or anyone else, but because God loves me despite my failures and therefore I find great joy in living because His love persists in all I do.