I feel self-conscious identifying as a perfectionist. Honestly, I never feel like I'm fulling living up to any claim I make about myself, and this one, of course, trends towards black-and-whiteness -- much like me.
In fact, one of the reason I've struggled so much with the Bible is that my experience of it is so wrapped up with the intense need to be good and exemplary and perfect all the time. Ideally, I could go to God with the things that hurt me, but I get paralyzed by my sense of my own inadequacy, until that sense of inadequacy diverts me entirely from my initial desire to serve Him through my work. So not only is the fact that staff saw me raising my voice at parents and kids yesterday incredibly demoralizing, but my shame over that takes over any efforts I have to focus on God: but before God can save me and I can experience His love, can I have a do-over on this shitty day? Because I can do better...
It keeps happening: I think of God, and then I think of the ways I haven't been what God wants, and I am so disappointed with myself, and my worship ends up shifting focus onto me. And I know that what I need is to see my failings as an opportunity for God's grace, an opportunity to see His goodness -- and for my staff to see it too.
I'm thinking of this now, reading the rest of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, because here's the thing: Lot and his family aren't that righteous. (Again with the offering his daughters to the rapists! Again with the raping dad when he's drunk!) Strictly speaking, this story isn't really about God's response to sin, though I always thought it was. But as a cautionary tale, really it fails wholly: the people who get saved are sinful, just like the ones who die. This isn't really about how only Lot and his family were good; they really weren't. This is a story about the mercy God shows, not because of Lot's goodness, but because of His. Even after Lot is shown this divine and astounding grace, he doesn't understand what he's been given: he turns and asks the angels if they can give him just one more thing.
That's what it's like with us and God. Any good thing I am given, I am given in addition to an infinite amount of goodness I don't deserve. A good day at work is icing on the gigantic freaking cake that is my life with God. That I am able to serve at all is a gift; for me to ask that I end each day feeling good about myself is the 21st century workaholics version of asking to be saved, but in a more convenient locale.
The world wants to annihilate all of us, really. My eating disorder, the things wrong with my brain, is probably the most visible aspect of this, for me -- but everyone is hanging on the edge of their own kind of destruction. Though some of us are more comfortable than others, those comforts are meaningless. I am at the mercy of a world in which what I deserve, in and of myself, is to be destroyed. I don't have a right to any of the things I have.
But God has given these things to me anyway, not because of the differences between my sin and other, more dramatic sins -- but because I am His. Even if I am conflicted, even if I am begging for just a little accommodation, even if I really can't commit. Even if leaving my life -- with its ego tripping and its self importance and its anxiety and shame -- is so hard I don't think I can do it, God has a whole rescue plan worked out. He won't save me because I am good; He saves me because I am His, and to the degree that I am His, I am good. I need to look at Him and where He is leading me -- not at what I think I am, or at what I am leaving behind when I go with Him.
And when I do that, what seems like the end of the world may actually start to look like a beginning. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah ends with Abraham, and he's looking down at what's gone. But when we Abraham, we're looking at him, not at the ashes. We're remembering that what the story is really about is this covenant, and that God's plan hasn't even really become manifest yet.
All this -- the things you thought were everything, the "it's all" you're thinking of when you say "it's all over" -- it was just a prelude. You thought the world was ending; it's not. You though you knew the beginning and end of who you were; but really, you had no idea. It's only when you're led out of the place you thought of as the world, that you start to see who you really are. It's only when I let go of my need to see myself, and to see myself in just this light, that I can look around me and see that I'm in the story, but I am not the story. That whether I'm a good site coordinator or not is not what's happening here. It's only when I let myself be guided to a place where the things around me cannot be made into a reflection of me, that I become part of something bigger than I am. That I become what, and where I am meant to be.
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