Fear not, stand firm

Since the beginning of January, I've been trying to follow a schedule of readings that will take me through the whole Bible in a year. I have to admit, three chapters of Exodus can be a tough chunk to get through in a morning. Especially before I've finished that vital second cup of coffee.

For every sloggy day, though, God laces a verse into my life like sweet water, and I see sinblind ideas rinse away like so much sediment. Like a few mornings ago. I was camped out in Exodus 14 with the Israelites:

"When Pharoah drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them, and they feared greatly. And the people of Israel cried out to the LORD. They said to Moses, 'Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not what we said to you in Egypt: 'Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.'
"And Moses said to the people, 

 'Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which He will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.'" 

(Exodus 14:10-14, English Standard Version)

There I am, scared of the "disorder" (fanged chaos!) behind me, trying not to panic at the task that is if anything more horrible, impassible in front of me. And God says He's going to fight the battle for me. 

Here I am, so afraid that I'll fail at the struggle ahead of me. Thinking defeat is so certain I might as well go back to Egypt. And He reminds me that it's not my struggle. It's His. And He's already won. I know Him, His love, His power, His trustworthiness. It doesn't matter that I can't win. I can -- I have the incomparable gift of being able to "delight myself in the Lord," and trust Him to bring me where He wants me to be, in His time.

"For freedom Christ has set you free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery," Paul writes (Galatians 5:21).

 ***

And now for proof that God does, indeed, have a sense of humor. When I looked for pictures related to "Red Sea crossing," I thought I might find a classical painting of the Biblical scene I could link to. Guess what I found instead?

Apparently there is an underwater restaurant in the Red Sea.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for another high-calorie snack (^_^)

Jesus didn't die to save the person I wish I was

Who do you want to be?

Since I was young, I was told that I was brilliant. For a while I believed it. This is who I wanted to be, the creator of astonishing beauty. This is much of what drove my efforts in artwork, music, words. 


I wanted, also, to be a good person. To be self-sacrificing, honourable, strong.

It's hard to confront the fact that the person I thought I was doesn't really exist. That I am a lover of beauty, but not a creator. That I am much more selfish and frightened and weak than I wanted.

How much of my life has been running away from that confrontation? I've poured so much energy into staying thin enough to "feel like myself." Does looking at my thin or not-thin self in the mirror keep me busy enough not to have to look at my character, my true self?

God tells us throughout His word that we are created to show forth His glory. He made me to reflect Himself.

Thomas Merton writes,

     "Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. ... My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love--outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. 
     We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves--the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. 
     All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honour, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.
     But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.


     "The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. ... Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.
Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him."  (New Seeds of Contemplation, 31-36)


"In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die. The reason for this is that I am born in selfishness and therefore my natural efforts to make myself more real and more myself, make me less real and less myself, because they revolve around a lie." (47)

After regeneration, Merton says, "life becomes a series of choices between the fiction of our false self, whom we feed with the illusions of passion and selfish appetite, and our loving consent to the purely gratuitous mercy of God." (41)

Christ didn't die to save the beautiful person I want to be.

He came to save the person that I am. He looked at me -- me -- and called me His beloved bride.

So do I keep trying to believe I am the person who I want to be, the sad and shining heroine of my own lifestory? Do I distract myself from existence entirely?


Or do I take what I am -- what I really am, so much less than I desire -- and bring it to God? Humbly, gratefully, forget my own desires and seek only to know Him? Forget about the genius I wanted, and take up the small talents He gave me, and say, "Here am I for Your service"?