Me and My Bad Self

Next time I ask God to do something, I won’t be so ready to assume how He will do it. Especially if it’s something as crucial as, “Lord, show me the Cross, show me what happened there!”

I asked this of the Lord several years ago. Since then I spiraled down toward what St. John of the Cross dubbed “The Dark Night of the Soul.”

And last year, for reasons I still don’t know (maybe because I asked Him again?), I took a nosedive into the Dark Night of the Soul.

Perhaps you’re not familiar with my bad self. I’m worse than I ever imagined. And I became quite intimately acquainted with all that badness over the last year.

Every day, for a year and a half, I opened up the Bible and saw myself reflected on its pages.

I fought against what I saw there. I kicked. I screamed. I threw every kind of protest I could — wasn’t I supposed to be beautiful in God’s eyes? The hideousness I saw in myself startled me. Vile pride. Murderous selfishness. Icky self-justification. The summary list could have been tallied in 10 point font and would have paved the road from the Gabbatha (the Stone Pavement) all the way to Golgotha.

I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t take it anymore. Shutting my eyes tight, I wandered around trying to find someone who would tell me that I’m not like what I saw in myself. And in desperation I declared in my heart that this wasn’t God showing me my bad self. It couldn’t be. Everyone always said He didn’t come like this.

They weren’t necessarily lying, they just might not have experienced what I’d been experiencing.

I had a positively wretched day a few weeks ago. I outright said ‘no’ to the Lord’s prompting. It was a low point. An agonizingly low point. As soon as I said no, I felt like Peter who had just denied the Lord.

I’m astounded by God’s mercies. Completely astounded. For years I’d been so caught up in thinking how good I was that I was never able to see His mercy, I mean really see His mercy, for how glorious it is.

Today was another positively wretched day.

I have an absolute abhorrence of death. A knee jerk reaction. This is really bad if one is a chicken farmer. I cry every single time one of my chickens dies. Every time. Today, the culprit was none other than my dog.

After guiding my daughter over to the neighbor’s house, so she wouldn’t be near while I took care of things, I walked to the back of my property, dog beside me with tail between her legs, deceased chicken in one hand, rope in the other hand, crying the whole way. I had to break my dog of doing this, and the most successful way is to tie the dead thing around the dog’s neck and leave the dog like that for a while. So I did what I needed to. I tied the dead chicken to the dog.

And my dog’s name?

Faith.

What a picture the Lord was showing me in the awful deed that I had to do!

I’d been carrying around sin which had been acting like a corpse attached to my faith.

I’m about to let Faith off the hook, so to say, and I’m sure she’ll never want to see a chicken ever again. Live or dead.

And as we walk through the steps of Holy Week, I’m ready to count the paces to the cross where I will lay all my sin down. And I hope, like my dog with chickens, that I’ll never want to willingly sin again.

Because now, more than ever, I know what it cost Him. He who knew no sin became sin so that we might become the righteousness of God. He became sin. For me. He carried my sin and the wrath for my sin so that I could be in relationship with Him.

And what was one of the most hideous portions of sin that I carried?

The idea that I was at all, in my own strength, good. That saying of Jesus, the one that confused me so much for years, now makes sense:

“Who is good but God alone?”

I see now how all of humanity is on a level playing field, or rather, all in the same cesspool / whirlpool of mire. In the cross, Jesus jumped in with us (I mean, who would do that willingly?) and provided, in Himself, the means for redemption from all that.

I am undone. I am undone by His singular beauty, by the One who is altogether lovely. For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross.

And as painful as my journey was to get here, I ask Him again, “Lord, please show me the cross! Let me know what happened there!” Because I know I’ve only glanced the surface of His unfathomable love. And that suffering I endured during the Dark Night of the Soul cannot be compared to the glory that will be revealed to me, through me, of Him.