Reflection

Earlier this week self-doubt and recrimination decided to take up residence in my head. “Who do I think I am? What do I really have to offer? Am I really helping the faculty? Am I helping David, Honoré or anyone else here?” I felt disheartened for no other reason than weariness and the constant rush of competing needs. ...During my morning writing, reading, and prayer time, I tripped over one self-doubt after another. The day’s reading was from Luke 17:20-37. Verse 33 caught my eye: “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.”   

It struck me that this verse isn’t about vain efforts to “make…life secure” through accumulating, climbing the socio-economic status ladder, saving, protecting things of value, doing things to keep our families secure. This verse is about vain efforts to secure intentions, agendas, goals, outcomes—those things against which we are tempted to define and validate ourselves. Or at least those things against which I’m tempted to define and validate myself.

I spent the next half hour emptying myself, crying out to God, writing about being completely empty, having nothing to give. It was the Luke 17:37 version of “I am powerless.” And, just as the exercise of listing all the things over which I am powerless frees me to acknowledge and rejoice in God’s grace and power, I was released from self-imposed expectations into the freedom of God’s grace and sufficiency. I don’t need to do, perform, provide, offer, help. I just need to be so that God can do, perform, provide, offer, help.