Failure

Humanity struggles with self image.  Having fallen from the perfect reflection of God that we were made to be, we all acknowledge it internally-if not externally.  It's expressed all over the place in the search for self worth in wealth, religion, looks and power.

Personally, I have a really hard time dealing with failure.  Part of it is my oldest child syndrome.  I want to fix everything.  Part of it is my search for perfection in my art.  It takes me a long time recover from a situation in which I feel like I let my client down, or didn't offer the best that I have to give.   I also have a need to please the people around me.  Make everyone happy, comfortable.

So failure and I don't get along.  At all.

God often takes the circumstances of my life and uses several different situations to press a point home to me.  Woody started a series in church on Freedom.  My mother in law and Renee had a falling out based on legalistic ideals.  Ruby requested we study Grace in SG.  I disappointed a client this week, one that I really like and wanted to be pleased.  One of my friends has turned sharply away from faith and into legalism.  And so in pretty much every area of my life God is teaching me about grace. 

What does grace have to do with failure?   Well, just that in one, I have desperate need of the other.  But I don't know how to receive grace many times.  Or believe that I am worthy of it.  The work of God is about God, not about my efforts in it.  This tension is difficult to understand and work through, since intrinsically I want to do and achieve.  And I gain self worth from doing well.

I'm still trying to understand practically what grace means daily for me.  Who I am.  Situations in life.  It's a process.  A journey.  It's a good thing God is patient with me.

"Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ."  ~ CS Lewis