on self-pity and showers

When I woke up this morning, I swear something was staring me down.  Gorged as all get out and terribly lethargic, self-pity’s tear drop eyes steadily gazed at me.  I squirmed in my bed and I could just feel it.  Yup, today was going to be a battle.  Like any good soldier, I drilled in preparation, reading the Bible and praying, but my heart wasn’t engaged.  The enemy was staring me down from his dark corner in my heart and my soul trembled.

Why such a heaping dose of self-pity?  No reason, no reason at all.  It was just sprinkled in my day like sugar in coffee.

As if my life were a crossword puzzle, I peered around, looking backwards, sideways, diagonal, upside down, searching for all those little “mistakes,” the things that ticked me off.  Once found, I circled them with bright red complaining.  To my trained eye, the day was beginning to look as red as a traffic light.  And self-pity, sitting in his corner, smiled.

I’m a professional pity-partier, and as such, I know better than to voice my woes.  If you voice them, one of two things can happen: an optimist will come and point out all the little rainbows and daisies and hearts and completely ignore your incredibly legitimate sorrows, or a better pity-partier will come and steal the show.  Either way, your pity party is ruined.  So I let my gloomy thoughts chase their tales in my head and self-pity take a light snooze as I did the work for him.

In the afternoon, my pity party reached a high-point as I extolled my virtues and pondered why my greatness wasn’t more widely recognized.  In fact, I even began planning this blog post as a sarcastic piece on that very subject that I could either try to redeem at the end with some sort of something about how Jesus is better, or I could entirely give up and let the piece stand as a full fledged pity party (the latter being the preferred option).

Then, the most amazing thing happened.

I took a shower.

Yes, you read that right.  I took a shower.  It was a profound theological moment as I realized my self-centeredness and Christ’s cleansing work on the cross that has the power to wash away my self-pity.

No, just kidding.  It was simply a shower.  It wasn’t even a nice long shower, it was a military shower.  But by the time it was over, I didn’t want to complain any more.  I sat down to right this blog post, and all the perfectly witty quips about my self-pity fled.

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve been trying to understand why my self-pity disappeared.  I can’t say that it was shame over revealing my sin; my family knows that I have no problem doing that.  It definitely wasn’t an epiphany.  I think it was gratefulness.

I couldn’t find anything wrong with my shower.  It was perfectly refreshing.  The only “complaint” I can think of was that it was making me take a break from my hard core pity partying, but even that was perfectly refreshing.  Once I found that thing that made me truly thankful, I didn’t want to ruin that beautiful feeling of thankfulness with a pity party.  I just wanted to revel in it.

God, in his kindness, sent me that shower.  I wasn’t looking to be delighted; I was grasping for shadows of discontentment, yet God chose to delight me anyway.  How perfectly loving he is.

In their unexaggerated forms, all of those less-than-perfect things are still present in my life, but I don’t want to focus on them.  I want to spend my time rejoicing in the only perfect thing, my God, and treasuring every gift he sends.

On fear

Early one morning this week I received a frantic knock on my door.  I haphazardly fell out of bed and opened the door to find one of the girls sobbing in the hallway.

            “What’s wrong?”

            “I had a bad dream and I’m scared of monsters,” she managed between sobs.

            I gave her a hug and began to walk her back to bed.  I sat on the edge and began to talk to her.

            “You know what, L—?  Those monsters you’re afraid of, they aren’t real.  The devil wants you to think of them and be afraid because he loves it when you’re scared.  But God doesn’t want you to be scared.  That’s why he sent Jesus to conquer the devil and your fear.  Because Jesus came, we don’t have to be afraid anymore because he loves us and will protect us.  So let’s pray and ask God to give you peace and help you to sleep.”

            We prayed, I lent her a teddy bear to sleep with and then crawled back in bed myself.

            Since I’ve been back, fear has been popping up fairly frequently.  A little girl wanting to shimmy up the tether ball pole, but afraid of falling; one girl afraid of drowning in the pool; me being afraid that if the girls leave and I’m not there to watch them, they won’t be cared for; all of us being afraid of being left alone as teams and children come and go and a few of us stay behind.  As each of us encounters fears, we decide how to react, either to become paralyzed or to move forward in love by faith.

            I’ve noticed that most times our fears aren’t completely ridiculous, and as I work with the girls, I love letting them know that and showing them how to move forward even though their fears are real.  Take for example the girl who was afraid of drowning.  She didn’t know how to swim and the pool went over her head in a few spots.  Her fear of drowning was legitimate.  While I talked to her, I never said that her fear was silly and it was impossible for her to drown, but I reminded her that I, who knows how to swim, would be by her side the whole time, watching her.  This reassured her enough that she hopped in the pool and eventually even dared to join her friends who were a little farther away from me.

            As I look back at this example, I can’t help but think that God likes to treat us similarly.  My worries are many and various, and when I read my Bible and pray to God, I never hear him say, “These are unfounded fears, they couldn’t possibly happen.”  I hear him softly whisper in my ear, “Cast your burdens on me; I will never permit the righteous to be moved.”  He affirms their weight, but asks me to trust more in his power.  When he does this, he’s not simply asking me to believe that trials aren’t difficult or that they won’t come at all; he’s asking me to trust that his redeeming purpose in the midst of difficult circumstances can lend a sweetness to the bitter, a sweetness that surpasses and outlasts all bitterness.  God recognizes my susceptibility to fear and addresses it, not by dismissing it, but by encouraging me to grow through it.

            I won’t lie; recently watching seventeen kids leave the ranch over a two day period brought a plethora of fear into my life.  Some fears were new, some were old, but all were weighed and cared for by my God.  I can’t be sure that the kids will be safe and taught truth.  I have no way of knowing the exact details of their lives.  But I do know the One who ordains their lives, and I know that he is unfailingly good.  One day I may even have the chance to see or hear about these kids, and I know that even then, I may not be able to say, “Ahah!  I’ve found God’s goodness in this situation.”  The undeniable truth is that I am not God.  I will never be able to understand his ways or fathom his wisdom.  But that does not negate his goodness.