Post date: Oct 7, 2010 4:37:09 AM
I venture into life, stumbling, falling, lost, confused: partly informed, partly deceived. I have my gifts and talents, and my faults and failings. The world praises me for my gifts and talents, but judges and rejects me for my faults and failings, so I learn to value myself by my performance, and I learn how to hide my faults and failings in a closet, hoping others will not see, and so their acceptance of me will be secure.
Then fear creeps in, and whispers, “what if someone finds my closet? Then they will surely judge, reject, and abandon you.” So I build a facade around it, with attractive distractions, all at least a certain distance from my closet, so no one gets too close to it. It forms a perimeter around my closet that I feel safe with. And now I feel in control, I feel safe, having set up my perimeter, having constructed a reality for others to see, where I don’t have to fear being fully seen.
But even if I am successful at hiding my closet from others, I cannot hide it from myself. I cannot escape my own knowledge of it’s presence, and the uneasy gnawing at my conscience. I can try to live in my facade, but the closet remains at the center, anchoring me to this cycle of momentarily getting away from it through my outward image, then being pulled back to it’s presence, like a gravitational field, I stay in orbit around it.
The very things I seek to hide about myself, become anchor points of my existence. By trying to hide them, they insidiously become the very center of my being, and
“I Do the very thing I hate”
So how am I freed from this bondage? Through Christ alone. All my hiding is but a feeble attempt to escape the natural consequences of my sin – to preserve myself apart from God. To be my own salvation, or to seek salvation in the opinions of others about me. If others buy my act, and affirm me for it, I can use their opinion of me to counterbalance my opinion of me. But that’s why it simply doesn’t work: I can’t go forward, only in circles as the scales of opinion swing back and forth. God calls me out from my hiding,
“What is hidden in the darkness must be brought into the light”
From the darkness of hiding, into the light, not to condemn me,
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”
but to reveal my bondage to sin – and to free me from it.
“The truth shall make you free”
The real problem in the hiding is my own inability to escape my own judgment, my self-rejection, and my own condemnation. In hiding, I become my own judge. In order to find God’s forgiveness and grace, I have to let him judge – I have to let him in. I let Him in by letting others in – God’s grace is a communal experience: hiding people cannot find it.
“Confess your sins one to another” “Bear one another’s burdens”
When my closet is revealed, the need for the perimeter of “safety” suddenly vanishes, and with it my need to expend so much energy on my facade. My orbit around my closet is broken and I am set free to move forward, towards my true center: God Himself.
God wants to replace my closet with Himself. He accomplished this by taking the natural consequence for my sin Himself, through his son. The consequence has been paid, now there is no need to fear
“Perfect love casteth out all fear” “Greater Love has no man than he who would lay down his life for his friends”
Rather than circling around what I hide, and being bound to it as my core identity, God seeks to reconcile me to Himself, by forgiving what is in my closet, He has eliminated it’s relevance, leaving a space, a space that He can fill.
A space in fact, that only He alone could ever fill:
God always was,
is,
and will always be,
my true center.
© 2009, Brian Lee