I’m realizing lately just how broken I am.
Cheery start, huh?
Growing up, I often faced a hurdle in my faith because I had a hard time recognizing my own sinfulness. Don’t get me wrong – I knew I wasn’t perfect, but I played that centuries-old comparison game and tended to come out near the top of the pack. I mean, one of my most rebellious high school moments was when I held hands with a boy before we began dating. Scandalous, yo.
I lived my life under a banner of self-righteousness.
Not in your face self-righteousness. Not too perfect to fail self-righteousness. Not even I believe I am good enough self-righteousness.
It was a quiet, crippling self-righteousness that led to inaction. Although I knew I needed saving, I was blind to what I needed saving from.
Time provided that answer: myself.
I went to a musical last weekend with a friend here in Seattle. The show, Next to Normal, focuses on a family where the mother, Diana, is dealing with bipolar disorder and manic depression. She tries treatment after treatment, drug after drug, to try to return to normal. One of the starkest moments for me is when Diana tells her psychopharmacologist after the newest round of medication, “I don’t feel like myself. I mean, I don’t feel anything.” His response? “Patient stable.”
And I felt like that for so long. My standard for wellness in my faith centered on maintaining the status quo.
Later on in the show, once Diana has chosen to stop taking the medication, she relapses into her mania. Her husband encourages her to go through electro-shock therapy as a last-resort course of treatment (you guys, I promise this musical is worth seeing and not as crushingly depressing as the description sounds…or maybe it is, but still, go see it). When even that doesn’t work, Diana comes to a moment of realization, singing, “What happens if the cut, the burn, the break was never in my brain, or in my blood, but in my soul?”
My soul is broken without Christ.
I can walk around in a haze of self-righteousness, believing that as long as I feel nothing then there’s nothing to be saved from. It’s a lie. Obedience to the law will never be enough to heal my soul.
Beneath it all, I am broken without Christ.
It’s a lesson I’m still learning. It’s a lesson I will always be learning.
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“Let me ask you this one question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not! You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ. How foolish can you be? After starting your new lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? Have you experienced so much for nothing? Surely it was not in vain, was it?
I ask you again, does God give you the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you because you obey the law? Of course not! It is because you believe the message you heard about Christ.”
Galatians 3:2-5
The Long Way Round 