if you listen

The purpose of the blog is multi-fold. For some, it serves as a place to demonstrate one's literary skills, for others an update on their lives. Still to others it is an outlet for one's thoughts, a commentary on what one has just seen, heard, or experienced. Then sometimes, it is a cry for help.

I cannot begin to list the many blessings God has shown me this past year. They are innumerable, both abstract and tangible. What has since eclipsed my vision of those blessings, what has drawn a veil between me and my experience of them, is an illness and subsequent sadness that has debilated me from living out those blessings and instead caused me to struggle with tears through the hardships of inadequcy each day.

Pastor Julian preached a wonderful message on humility last Sunday and he said some things that have continued to stay with me, puzzling me at every turn of my week. As a close, he stated that one of the ways to practice humility is to let others have the grace of helping you, to allow yourself to let down those walls and be helped. It was such an idyllic idea that I almost lept to it, almost fully believed it, and would have had I not realized that such a statement first predicated itself on the assumption that humans wanted that grace. It has been my experience - both as this grace's witholder and desirer - that the inconvenience and embarrassment of such situations prevent its actually being lived out.

Another recurring theme in the message of humility is the equation of despair with pride (humility's underlying and virulent antagonist). This second one I struggle with. And I struggle with it because I have lived a life haunted by the message of my own inadequacy. Coming back to Cambridge this second time around has been more difficult than I would have ever imagined. Maybe it is partly because I have been physically sick, but more and more I desire to know what has attacked my spirit and stolen my joy. I wonder why it has been so hard readjusting to something I loved so much and had settled into so well just a few weeks prior. I came home today crying as I made my way up the steps to my room, so full of the weight of inadequacy, of the overwhelming sense of work that I had before me. Trying to study in the manuscripts room earlier, I had called up my supervisor's PhD dissertation and reading through it, was struck by the amount of knowledge I still had not yet attained. The greatness of his prose, the beauty of his words poured forth and I could only admit that my own paper was so very lacking in the depth of knowledge the British are trained to have.

I don't know where to go from here. And it's hard to step forward. If despair is a hidden pride then I wish for it to be taken away from me. How do you reconcile the paradox that you are worth the whole world in God's eyes and yet at the same time absolutely nothing? How do you reconcile the paradox that there is inherent worth inside of you and yet at the same time absolutely nothing worthy in there to make God love you, that it just His grace that saves you? Do we have worth that inheres in us? I struggle with this each day of my life. And more than anything now, I just feel sad. There are days where I wish God would come down in human form and just hug me and tell me that everything is going to be okay. But the wall in front of me looks unscaleable, and it scares me, especially when all of my classmates are leaping deftly and fearlessly over it. Instead I stand here, with only one arm outstretched, hoping that someone will want to exercise his or her grace. And truly mean it.

Posted on January 21, 2006 at 09:40AM