The message you need to hear today

Life is messy.

It is not black and white. It is a huge inferno of gray.

The same can be said of you. You are not all good or all bad.

This may not seem like a newsflash. Yet I think it is subliminally unrecognized or challenged. I suspect that religion and culture has shaped us to believe otherwise and it is extremely detrimental for several reasons.

In the first most obvious place, it is impossible to thrive and love well if you believe yourself to be a miserable worm of a person who is predisposed to evil. You have to have hope that you can choose what is good and be good.

BUT. If you hold yourself to a perfect standard of goodness, you will be forever shattered every time you make a mistake and find out your capability for what is not good.

In other words, you are a good person, but expect to make a lot of bad mistakes!

To live life joyfully and without cynicism or anger, we must expect ourselves and others to make mistakes... even big mistakes... and still be inherently valuable people.

It is much easier to villify someone who has hurt you than to recognize they made a mistake and are still an amazing person. See culture and media for references. It is even sometimes easier to wallow in your wrongdoing rather than knowing you are meant for something better and moving on. Now perhaps you can see how affected we are by how we think of this issue.

There can be no degrees of holiness or attainment of holiness. There are no saints or sinners... only saints AND sinners... sinnaints perhaps. Hagios or the Greek for holy signifies "separated"
We are all set apart for good... which is God (whether you recognize it or not*) We have already been claimed for what is good - we just need to continually step toward it. And when we slip up and find ourselves in the completely opposite direction, we need not despair - only remember what is good and turn back toward it.

Never mind defining or debating what is good right now. The point is... YOU CAN MAKE MISTAKES AND STILL BE GLORIOUS AND HEROIC

There's a list of biblical "heroes" that reminds us of their mistakes which I love.

Noah was a drunk
Abraham was too old
Isaac was a daydreamer
Jacob was a liar
Leah was ugly
Joseph was abused
Moses had a stuttering problem
Gideon was afraid
Samson had long hair and was a womanizer
Rahab was a prostitute
Jeremiah and Timothy were too young
David had an affair and was a murderer
Elijah was suicidal
Isaiah preached naked
Jonah ran from God
Naomi was a widow
Job went bankrupt
Peter denied Christ
The Disciples fell asleep while praying
Martha worried about everything
The Samaritan woman was divorced, more than once
Zaccheus was too small
Paul was too religious

So do not allow yourself to despair, to become cynical, or to believe you are not good enough. You have already been claimed as good enough and no amount of mistakes will ever change that!

Lots of love,
Liz

*See the dwarves in C. S. Lewis's book The Last Battle.