Claimed

Listen, I just don't know what to do about me.

Some days I am astounded at how self-absorbed I am. I'll look back at a journal entry or a blog post or a message I've sent and be struck by how the only thing that I have considered (and I'll have considered it at length) is myself. I'll walk away from a conversation realizing that I turned it into something about me when there was a real living, breathing human being across from me that I should have been listening to and caring for and loving properly. I make decisions taking only my own problems into account and even actions that I meant for good were done with self-preservation in the back of my mind. I care only my problems, my pain, my worries, and any pain that isn't felt by me or problem that isn't experienced by me isn't real to me.

Some days I surprise myself with just how hateful I can be to me. I'll let the endless litany of irredeemable faults continue long after I should have stopped it in its tracks. I'm sure parts of it are familiar to some of you: I'm so useless, so lazy, too fat, too poor, too dumb, too loud too loud too loud, too harsh, incapable, unlovable, unworthy, and, my personal favorite, too ugly to be valuable in anyone's eyes. Those days, the litany days, those are the days when I know that everyone else knows that I've never earned a seat at any table I've sat at, have never really contributed anything, could never really contribute anything, and am just a waste of oxygen and space. And even on the non-litany days, on the days when I'm buoyed by my friends and my family, I still find that self-hatred has been at the root of some of my struggles, an absolute unwillingness to forgive myself for human mistakes, a chorus of stupidstupidstupid playing in the background of every memory I bring to mind.

I wallow in the muck and mire of the twin sins of self-obsession and self-rejection. They feed each other, I think, or at least work together, two drainage pipes emptying into this pit I'm stuck in, that I choose to be in, and it's so hard to see clearly from down here.

But listen, friends, we were not made for life in mire. We were never destined for the muck.

We end up there, sure. I don't want to downplay the severity of our fall-- the litany of lies that I let play sinks deep down into my heart to places that I've never explored and bubbles up after every conversation or interaction and in the quiet moments before the decision to act. It stains everything, just as my inward turn to see only my own pain is writ large in our society, depriving us of the empathy that would inhibit our many and myriad unjust actions. Sin is real, individual and societal, and we don't like to hear it and we don't like to see it, not only because of the deep pain it causes us and others, but also because it reminds us over and over again that we cannot fix ourselves and we so desperately want to be fixed. But we do not live as those without hope, because we were never meant to be sin's.

I know that I am loved beyond measure. (Apparently Martin Luther, when he was being tempted, would yell, "I am baptized!" and I like that, that the memory of that claim on his life was what he needed to get through a trial.) I know that for all my faults and all my turnings-away, I live as one redeemed (as are you). The weighty pull of the muck and the mire, chain-like though it may feel, has been cancelled by a first-century Jew from Palestine. The only claim it has on our lives is the one we let it have when we forget who and whose we are. Though I daily need to watch out for and work against selfishness in its many forms, I can silence the voices that take away my worth. I know my value and where it comes from. Anyone else's opinion, including my own, doesn't matter.