Just don't trust me.

In this post a few weeks ago, I wondered what humility was. My brand of it, it struck me, was just a brand of reverse snubbery. I feel so rich and so loved that I don't even need any pride. Too bad for those of us who do need pride (and need it desperately at times).

On the other hand I've been confronted again and again with my own mediocrity and a few spectacular failures on the relational front. I've tried to be better than I am and I could not sustain it. I've now come to the conclusion that I simply cannot be trusted. The spirit might be willing, but my motives are flawed, my determination is flaky, I harbour massive doubts about God and heaps of formless resentment about I don't even know what.

I've tried to rise above all of those dozens and dozens of times, only to fall desperately short almost every time. Like 99% of the time. Given this rate of failure, I've concluded that I simply cannot be trusted. It's amazing that this realisation should have taken me that long.

This changes nothing to my reverse snubbery though. In itself this reverse subbery is not a bad thing. I still feel rich and beloved without bounds. There is a form of prayer which I invented years ago which I used to call the car boot sale. If you've been to car boot sales you realised that people's crap gets exposed in the morning sun, in the hope to be loved again. So I would expose all of my own crap, for hours on end or until I got tired, to see if I could still get loved by God. God loved me with all of my crap, all of the time. So like a lizzard enjoys the rays of the sun, I would sometime come out of the darkness from time to time to sunbathe in God's love.

But back to my topic. I cannot be trusted to deliver what I wish I could deliver. Whether I like it or not it's a fact. It's taken me ten years to look it in the face but I cannot rely on my own character, and I cannot even rely on God sorting out my character and turning me into someone who does not fail so much. I know. I've tried. I give up.

My friend Dan, in his comment to my original post, made the following contribution:

Basically, I've come to the conclusion that humility is the deeply-rooted realization of one's absolute and total insignificance and the utter futility and meaninglessness of pretty much everything one does.



And still, a few sayings float around in my mind, which beg to bear on this state of affair:

They are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit (Matt 15)

Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me (John 15)

Evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread (D.T. Niles)

A saint is someone the light shines through (source unknown)

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3)

What these sayings have in common, it strikes me, is the relative absence of self-reliance they imply.

The first one seems targetted at self-reliant teachers. The second one is possibly an attack on the very notion of the individual as individual, the third one seems to want to circumvent any cult of personality and questions the importance of person-to-person relationships when it takes up the space of the God-to-person relationship. The fourth one shifts the onus of sainthood to "the light" who shines where the heck it wants, as the fifth saying makes clear.

What I'm really coming at, and what gave me enough hope to write this post, is an intuition that if I can't trust myself, maybe I can trust something else instead.

This is hardly a scoop. Christians are no supposed to trust themselves but God. We know. Thing is, I've tried several understandings of that. I oscillated between the two extremes of calling in God's support in my projects, or getting completely despondent and doing nothing at all of my own accord. Still all about me me me.

But I'm getting rambly, let's cut to the core. My conclusion is don't trust me. I can't be trusted. Don't rely on me, I can't be relied on. Seriously, I'll fail. I failed before, and I'll fail again, we'll all get hurt. Maybe the kingdom of God is just more fluid. Sainthood is fluid too. It doesn't attach itself to a person but to a people. There is a thing called grace and it works, but we don't know where and we don't know how. By rubbing shoulders with God's family you'll come across some of it some of the time. Not a whole lot. Sometime in you, sometime in others. There is no rule. But if you are going to trust anything, trust in the dynamics of the Kingdom of God.