I found a scrap of paper in my bag a while back1 with thoughts I know I’ve felt but don’t remember writing down. I’m sure it came in prayer, a time of prayer when I was stronger than I am now, readier to beg for suffering and less weary of the plodding pain of the everyday. I put it aside with the intention to finish it someday. And maybe I will. But tonight, I think I’m going to offer it to you half thought out, simply a plea for God to break down the idols I’ve made of him and be God in my life.
I don’t need a nice God, a safe God, one who leaves me comfortable in my complacency. I need a God who knocks down the walls with a trumpet blast and leaves me to be ravaged by grace.
I don’t need a God made in my image and likeness but a God who breaks me and molds me into his.
I won’t give my life to a God who exists to approve my plans and validate my will but a God who leads by fire and cloud and sends a great fish to swallow me if he must.
I want the God of the whale’s belly, of despair and broken pride, who opens the sea and shuts the lions’ mouths, who floods the world to send a rainbow.
I don’t want a nice shepherd but a good shepherd, one who knocks me upside the head and drags me from danger.
And though he slay me, still will I trust in him.2
Stop settling for a plaster God and start worshiping the God who breaks hearts and makes them new. Knock down your idols of comfort and security and let God be God. Let him move and speak and shake you. Give him permission to ruin your life. I promise he will rebuild it into something more joyful and glorious than you could ever have imagined.
If you are plagued by mediocrity, ask God for something better. But be warned: if you offer him your life, he just might take it.
I find in my life, and particularly in my ministry, that God is very careful to preserve a balance of praise and correction. Because my heart is rather more tender than I would wish, this balance is often very heavy on the consolation with detractors sprinkled in only when I can handle it. But even without outside admonition, I find myself regularly overwhelmed by my own failings. As proud as I am—and I am shockingly proud—one angry face in a crowd of fifty can convince me that I’m really rather useless and I ought to stop preaching because I’m never going to be good enough.
But then, because our good God is particularly fond of me, I’m surrounded again by praise and gratitude and I try again to remind myself that only God matters. And over the years, the mercurial swings between pride and self-loathing have evened out a bit. I rarely think I’m the best thing that ever happened and only slightly more often think I’m worthless. God just keeps working on my heart to teach me humility.
It’s gotten me thinking lately. To borrow a phrase from Genesis—and a central idea from the Theology of the Body—I think humility is being naked without shame. It’s standing naked, completely aware of all your faults and failings, and feeling no self-loathing, only gratitude to a God who uses even your weakness for his glory. It seems to me, looking at this virtue from a great distance, that the truly humble soul has no illusions about his poverty but rejoices in it. Even our sinfulness, I think, might prompt guilt and sorrow and a desire to repent, but not despair.
In the same way, the humble soul sees herself naked before the eyes of God and marvels at her glory. She sees not just her flaws but her beauty, the way she images God in his wisdom or humor or simplicity. But just as Adam and Eve did, she knows herself to be a creature and any joy in her goodness becomes praise of her Creator.
The more I’m conformed to Christ,1 the more I’m able to look at myself and see myself as I truly am without misery. My acceptance of my whole self has mirrored my acceptance of my body. I’m sure there’s less to be pleased with now than there was back when I used to be “fat” and “ugly” but more and more I look in the mirror and see beauty. In the same way, my sins stand in starker relief now than when I first came to know the Lord, but I’m less often driven to despair. I’m more myself than I used to be, which often means louder and more intense, but somehow he’s made me more gentle, both with the souls I serve and with myself.
I’m beginning to see myself as he sees me, naked but without shame. I’ve got a long way to go, emotional perfectionist that I am, but I think now I at least know what I’m aiming for. Rather than ignoring or belittling my gifts, I spend time with the Lord letting him tell me how he loves those things about me, praising him for his mercy in letting me be of use to him. Rather than replaying moments of failure over and over, I try to offer them to the Lord and thank him for humbling me.
It’ll take a whole lot of purgatory to make me a truly humble person, but I’m beginning to be okay with that. All I can do is show up, offer myself into the hands of our merciful Lord, and ask for his grace. If the person I am is what he’s chosen to make of my efforts, I’ll praise him and keep fighting, naked without shame.
I do a lot of things that look scary on paper: traveling to Palestine and Bosnia, showing up at strangers’ houses to spend the night, sharing my brokenness with the world at large. But there is nothing that scares me more than telling teenage girls that leggings are not pants.1
Now it’s true that leggings aren’t pants. I know it’s true because godly young men have given me a round of applause when I’ve said this and others have glared at me like I canceled Christmas. I know it’s true because while women may have stopped noticing the half-clad hordes surrounding them, the men I’ve asked have not, much though they might wish they could.2
I know it’s true. And yet I’m terrified. If I tell them, they’ll hate me. They’ll get so angry and stop listening and tell everybody I’m an awful person. And so (on this as on so many topics) I keep my mouth shut to preserve their opinions of me. Or I say what needs to be said and feel miserable about it, obsessing over how people might feel about me.
I do a lot of that: having irrational emotions about other people’s opinions. I was born with a lot of feelings–big feelings–and I’ve been trying to chill out ever since.
Growing up with big feelings, you develop a lot of coping mechanisms. You learn to talk yourself down from irrational shame and self-loathing, to breathe deeply and process and occasionally to drive to the middle of nowhere, pull over, and scream and sob till you’re spent. When you’re the kind of girl who once burst into tears and stormed out of a room because a friend asked what you were making for dinner, the kind of girl whose college application essay was about what you do to calm down when you’re miserable, you spend a lot of time honing these skills.
It gets to be a habit. “It doesn’t matter that I sounded like an idiot in that comment,” you say, “because nobody there knows who I am anyway.” “It doesn’t matter because probably nobody noticed when I said that.” “It doesn’t matter because they’ve already forgotten about it.” “It doesn’t matter because if you think about it this way, I was right.”
I was proceeding through this litany a while back, using reason and logic to remind myself that probably nobody hates me and even if they do they don’t know me and I’ll never see them again, when God intervened.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “because only I matter.”
“Yes, right. And also, that guy clearly misunderstood me. And really, it doesn’t matter because everybody else—”
“It doesn’t matter because only I matter.”
“Well, yes, of course, but also it was a long day and so what if I misspoke? It doesn’t matter because she—“
“It doesn’t matter. Because only I matter.”
Now I don’t generally hear the voice of God when I pray. Some people do and that’s awesome, but I’m not one of those people. Not audibly, anyway. But there are times when I know exactly what he’s saying.
“It doesn’t matter because only I matter.”
The coping mechanisms I developed when I was an emotional adolescent wreck were terribly helpful. But I’m less emotional, less adolescent, and less of a wreck now. I’m still far more emotional than most people I know, but I’ve learned to let God use that for the good. Most of the time. And yet here I am, still trying to find peace in who I am instead of looking to who he is.
I spend so much time wondering if I’m pleasing other people. I’ve always been a people-pleaser. “Peggy the Peacemaker,” they used to call me,3 not because I wanted people to get along but because I wanted them to admire me. And now I wonder if I looked okay, if I offended anyone,4 if I was clever enough, if I was boring. I want so much to please people when all that matters is being pleasing to God.
I justify it by claiming that I have to be likable to be an effective witness, but it’s not true. I just have to be who God made me to be. It doesn’t matter what people think as long as I’m being faithful. It doesn’t matter because only God matters.
A lot of what I write here I write because I’m trying to convince myself, not because I think I’ve arrived. So when I tell you that only God matters, I’m not saying it as a saint but as a sinner who’s been convicted. I keep worrying and caring and over-analyzing, but each time it’s interrupted: only God matters. I’m trying to let being his be enough.
Love others. Serve others. Live for others. But not for their approval. That doesn’t matter. Only God matters.
The inimitable Rozann Carter knows exactly what I mean. Read more here.
And pray for me: I’ve got some people to offend.
I’m not judging you, it’s not your fault, you didn’t know, please don’t hate me! [↩]
One of these days I’ll give you my thoughts on modesty. Until then, Lauren said it well. [↩]
Back in the day when I went by Peggy, which is short for Margaret, just like Meg is. And just because you didn’t know that doesn’t mean it’s not true. People are always trying to tell me Meg isn’t a nickname for Margaret and I’m all “THOMAS MORE’S DAUGHTER WAS NAMED MARGARET AND HE CALLED HER MEG AND HE’S A SAINT!!!” Because I want them to know I’m right. Because I care too much what they think about me. And now we’re back to the topic at hand. [↩]
