Such is the confidence we have toward God through Christ. Not that we are adequate in ourselves so as to consider anything as having come from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (II Corinthians 3:4-6)
Yesterday’s
post was about thanking God for our leaders, even if we don’t approve of them. In many ways, today’s is about the opposite. We
should be thankful for our failures and inadequacies, or our lowliness. We have
no adequacy of our own worth talking about – any more than those leaders do.
All the things we want to praise our leaders for is given to them. God makes
them adequate just as He makes us adequate, meaning that adequacy on their part
is something we can and should pray for.
But our own adequacy? Our own lack
thereof? It’s so easy to get caught up in the “I must be self-sufficient. I
must be adequate. I must be better” game. We’re supposed to fake it until we make
it. One of my personal demons is “Not Good Enough!” Are we supposed to be
thankful for our ineptitude? Our inadequacy? Our incompetence? Our being a nobody?
A nothing? A failure?
It’s hard. We need to be
better. In fact, we desire to be “like God’ and anything less is in one way or
another failure. And it is? We cannot possibly be like God. We must fail in every
attempt. That’s not cruelty on God’s part, it’s just plain reality. God is God.
We are not, but how could we not want to aspire to at least some of what God is?
Is it wrong to want to be wise? Good? Effective? Powerful? Loving? Hopeful?
Joyous? Complete? Most of us would kick all that to the curb if we could be in
control (which would actually be worthless without all those other things.) But
we aren’t God, we can’t be God, and therefore, all those things are beyond us.
We would do well to get past this, but … how?
But people whose legs or backs don’t work
are helped by wheelchairs. Blind people have seeing-eye dogs. What would we
think of someone paralyzed from the waist down, or someone blind who refused
the help of a wheelchair or assistance animal, saying, “I don’t need help?” What
would we say to someone who refuses to take medication needed for physical or
mental health? It might be their choice, but how sad for someone who can’t see
to claim he can, or someone who can’t walk to claim she can run a marathon. So
perhaps it’s not so much that we should thank God for our inadequacies, as that
we should thank Him for helping us to face them, to stop denying them, and to
accept them. That’s the only way we can make progress.
And, once we can thank God for those
failures, inadequacies, incompetence, and failures, we can thank Him for the
ways in which He steps in, provides, and helps us in them.
This all recalls my frequent cry of “Lord,
I don’t understand!”
There
are times when He says, “That’s OK, you don’t have to.”
And
I reply, “But, God, You don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
I
really need to change that comedy routine to “Lord, I don’t understand! But thank
You because You do.”
And
that idea recalls a decision I made a long time ago. I realized that I answer, “How
are you?” with slight variations of the same response without considering how I
really am. At some point, I decided to change my response to “Wonderful,” or “I’m
doing wonderfully.” (I have to watch; the grammar police might be around.) I found that my condition improved, at least a
little because I stopped defining everything down, and started defining it up. How
many of my responses are rote repetitions of something I learned to say without
consideration of its truth?
So,
I am thankful for my weaknesses, my sinfulness, my failures, for my incompetence,
ineptitude, and my status as a nobody, because they all give God opportunities
to work. And the fact that there are so many places for Him to work in my life
means I can hope to see Him at work more than if I were some near perfect “Saint.”
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