Every day’s so hard, looking for a reason to keep on living when I hate my life… don’t think God loves me, don’t know why I’m alive, lonely without a single person in the world I am close to… I keep thinking silently to no one in particular, “it hurts so much I could die”… and the pain drives me to seek any small thing, even sin, that can distract me, comfort me, take my mind off reality, even work is a kind of relief… since I cannot seem to turn my desires from sin to seek God properly, and I am utterly useless as a Christian, I have probably relinquished the faith, even a loving God would surely not want me… every day I ask for more mercy, wondering if my prayers even leave the room…
I made sure to write down my true thoughts and feelings while I still had them, because I know that recalling them in hindsight through the veil of time is never the same. Usually, I can’t even remember accurately what I was thinking.
How the weeks have flown by, so indifferently. I read books and listened to sermons in search for answers, but the flashes of insight never had a lasting effect. I was drowning in these feelings, every day, in the morning they greeted me and at night they whispered until I fell asleep.
This morning, I searched on DG for anything containing the word “uselessness”. Perhaps if I was reminded of the parable of the talents, and admonished not to waste what God has given me, I would finally be motivated to some action. But instead, I found that the very same words of accusation that haunted me day and night were affirmed to be true, and then I was free…
What was William Carey’s secret?… The tablet on his grave reads,
WILLIAM CAREY
Born August 17th, 1761
Died June 9th, 1834
A wretched, poor, and helpless worm,
On Thy kind arms I fall.
The secret for William Carey was not self esteem. He was poor in spirit to the very end. “A wretched, poor, and helpless worm,” he calls himself, knowing very well his sin and failures.
His secret was in the last line of his epitaph: “On Thy kind arms I fall.” This was his secret in dying and this was his secret in living. He cast himself, poor, helpless, despicable on the kind arms of God. For he knew the promise of Jesus: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for to them belong the merciful and mighty arms of the King of kings.
Blessed are the poor in spirit who mourn. Blessed are the people who feel keenly their inadequacies and their guilt and their failures and their helplessness and their unworthiness and their emptiness—who don’t try to hide these things under a cloak of self-sufficiency, but who are honest about them and grieved and driven to the grace of God.
God did not say to Moses, “Stop putting yourself down. You are somebody. You are eloquent.” That is not the biblical way. What God said was, “Stop looking at your own unworthiness and uselessness and look at me. I made the mouth. I will be with you. I will help you. I will teach you what to say. Look to me and live!1
Piper and Carey are right. Everything in the Bible points to this, and yet I had forgotten. But that is not the point here, rather, what a relief it is, to know that it is alright that I am no good, when the voice that says I cannot fail is silenced by the voice of truth, and that voice says, it is enough that God chooses to be kind to you.
Perhaps this is what I had to come home to learn, though I did not know at the time what exactly it would be (how could I? who truly knows, except vaguely, what it is he or she has to learn?), only that my life had stopped making sense and I was completely dependent on Sundays to blow on the dying embers of my desire for God. I was still lonely often, but had enough good conversations, purposeful activities, distractions and fun that I never reached my breaking point… and this was one of the things, which I was too ashamed to share with anyone, that strengthened my conviction to move back, because I was treating many things as emotional crutches; at home I would have none of them and so perhaps would seek God more whole-heartedly.
Maybe I have to learn what it is to fail utterly before I can learn to stand firm, because then when I stand, it will be on God’s kindness in Christ alone. I understood that salvation is in Christ, yes, but without understanding fully (and still not). But it was enough when my faith was strong. It is when I am weak, that small overlooked cracks threaten to swallow me alive. It is when I am weak, that the contrast between faithful, fruitful, joyful Christians and my own state of gross inadequacy, uselessess, unfaithfulness, loneliness and despair, becomes devastatingly apparent… it was impossible for me not to associate good works with God’s love and approval, despite the number of times I’ve heard “salvation is Jesus plus nothing”.
So I rejoice to be stripped of my arrogance to think I am not permitted to fail, to be inadequate, to be useless. The great irony is that as I rest joyfully in God’s kindness, I find the strength to live. To write. I keep thinking of William Carey’s words. “A wretched, poor, and helpless worm, On Thy kind arms I fall.” How true it is!