Stripped

Being unemployed is, I'm finding, a desert experience. Every week - sometimes every day - it feels like another layer of self is peeled away, revealing more of what is actually inside.

It's curious to me how much I can use the interactions of things like jobs and people and phone calls and e-mail and the Internet and radio/CD noise to drown out what is happening inside of me. It seems like only now, that all of that has essentially stopped, that I can in some different way truly see and hear myself.

And frankly, I don't like everything I'm finding.

My inadequacies become more revealed. My sin becomes more apparent. Those things that I manage to cram down beneath the facade of getting through the workday bubble up in a wretched cauldron of foulness. The emotions that I usually seem to be able to manage burst out like a volcano.

All in all, not a pretty picture.

And then I am confronted with the reality of the Gospel: this is what I am without Christ. Look at everything I manage to hold together in my own power - but the reality is, all that is managing this is finite. It's me - and even in the me, it is really only gifts from Him. It's going away. Imagine suddenly facing God with the self - the true self, with none of the aides I use to hold myself in check -revealed. At that point, the foolishness of thinking that I truly controlled myself and my life will be gone - but it will be too late.

But for the reality of the Gospel: That God through His Son did what I could not do and paid the price of my sin, so that when God sees me, He sees the righteousness of His Son, not the mess that I am. Certainly I need to endeavor to deal with my sin - but never in the belief or conclusion that it is under my own power.

Look at the mess I managed to make on my own.