Dirty confessions

As you are a reader of this site, I feel I have something to tell you.  A lot of people know me as the Jesus guy, a straight-laced neatnik patriot who spends a lot of him time explaining how and how not to do things.  But the truth is that I haven’t been walking with Christ for very long, and I want to confess some things to the reader before any of them get into my theological and philosophical musings.  These first couple of parts may disgust you, and they should.

First off, I have used and abused many women, leading at least a few that I know of to cry, which I then publicly bragged about. I claimed at the time that they were hurt just because I was charming, but it was really for my own pride: I had been dumped by a woman, and wanted to make myself feel like a big man by ruining other women’s lives after making them emotionally attached to me.  Almost as though to say that if I was going to be small, they were going to be smaller; as though people’s daughters are something to be conquered and discarded as useless consumptives with no purpose other than to make me feel something. How disgusting an attitude, to live for nothing other than your feelings of pride.

There was also a period of about a year when I wanted to make myself feel like a good guy, so I looked for others to blame for the world’s problems.  I spent it picking on Black people.  Even though I had a record of drug abuse (I have even sold drugs to a kid who ended up–years later–dying of an overdose) and dropped out of college after mooching off of my parents, I thought it would be a good idea to show how blacks were inferior, causing all the world’s problems and being a drain on the overall happiness of society (you can still find hints of this in my oldest postings).   Although I maintained one or two black acquaintances during this period–the reasons they kept me around, I’ll never understand–I successfully argued for eugenics programs and segregation, as well as the deep “morality” of racism, something of which I am ashamed of today.  Looking back, if anyone deserved to be eugenicized, it was me.

But recognizing that simply wasn’t within my character, as you might have guessed.

And furthermore, there are many other things I’m ashamed about, but the purpose here isn’t just to drag myself through the mud.  What I want to let all of you know is that having a first-hand experience as a horrible person has taught me many things about the human race, most notably that hurt people end up hurting people, and that pride results in nothing but damaged relationships and wrecked souls.  This base form of humanity was the symptom I was faced with, and I desperately needed a cure.  I just hadn’t realized it yet.

When I did realize how empty my soul was, it only happened because I had met someone named Jesus Christ.  Some of you out there may shrug and roll your eyes, but this is the most important and useful part of the confession.  When I was confronted by someone who was completely righteous, who brutally told me exactly how I measured on the scale of universal and divine morality, I began to try and measure up.  Without an honest personal assessment, I thought that maybe I could follow His rules and try to become a better person, and then maybe I could have pride in myself all the time.  After all, if you follow God’s rule book, He is supposed to like you (or at least one would think so).

But what I eventually found was that I wasn’t feeling any better: I failed on almost every aspect of His morality, and I began to see what an ugly and pathetic failure I was.  Suddenly the finger I had been pointing at others began to bend back toward me, and I realized that everyone–everyone–is in the same position that I am, whether they recognize it or not.  The blacks who I’d constantly derided and hated suddenly began to look a lot like me and everyone else: flawed and human.  I began to have compassion for the women I had hurt.  I began to understand that if it weren’t for pride and reciprocal evil, the world simply wouldn’t be the horrible place it is today.  It was then that I began to feel despair for my state, to loathe myself and my existence.  I was the problem.

But that failure wasn’t what changed me.  It was what came after it.

The scary thing about getting to know a supremely just God like Yahweh is that He doesn’t tolerate evil, and if you can remember, I didn’t exactly deserve to be let off the hook.  I had hurt many undeserving people, and a good judge doesn’t pardon criminal offenders.  When I began to realize that I deserved punishment, but that this most perfect being–Jesus Christ–devoted His entire life to serving people like me, and was sacrificed in the most horrible way possible to make possible my salvation from impending and deserved judgment, that is when I started recognizing that I wasn’t anyone special.  That is when I recognized that the very real problems between whites and blacks wasn’t just blacks: it was our human sin.  That was when I recognized that getting hurt (in a way that doesn’t necessitate Biblical justice) doesn’t legitimize hurting others.  That was when I recognized that happiness isn’t produced by the selfish pursuit of happiness, but rather by having a proper relationship with a perfectly righteous and merciful God, a God who loved me and wanted me to not only be better, but to be perfect, free from the entrapments of a chemical and consumptive existence. His honesty and love for me is what made me change, not any personal fortitude and a few self-help books.  And because of Him, I want to let the people I’ve hurt because of my sin know that I am deeply, deeply sorry.

Of course, I’m not perfect today.  I have much to work on, including the pride I swore off.  But my point here is that I’m being cured–slowly–and I want to let you know that you can be too.  The world is an ugly place, full of ugly people, and we are no exceptions.  The deeper you look into the human heart, the more depraved and alone we seem, and we need to look deeply enough to be disgusted with ourselves.  We need to feel hopeless.  We need to reach out for help.  We need to know that we are mortally sick, and that our souls need a new kind of physician. 

The good news is that the physician has arrived, and that He isn’t some angry father shaking His finger at us until we bend over backward for His approval. Rather, He loves us so much that He is willing to pay any price to reconcile us to Him, and He is willing to take us as we are.  Not to accept our evil, but rather to save us from it.  And I want to let you know that He loves you, just like He loves me.  If there’s anything I can do to help you meet Him (not by murdering you), please contact me and I’ll try and introduce the two of you.  Because we both know that if He can help a worthless maggot of a man such as myself, He can do the same for anyone else.

Our liberator has arrived, ladies and gentlemen, and praise be to His name.