Finding Momentum

I’m sit­ting at Cof­fee Soci­ety here back home,  jour­nal­ing and feel­ing gen­er­ally over­whelmed by God’s good­ness. I’m not sure when I felt it, but it might have been yesterday’s slow, ram­bling run through the foothills from pre-dawn dusk to mid­morn­ing cool, or expe­ri­enc­ing the long-anticipated togeth­er­ness of a Thanks­giv­ing meal. Or maybe it was just hang­ing with Annie over lunch and being able to feel like a big brother again, or that my dad just dropped a new iPhone in my lap… just like that. I’m see­ing move­ment in my life, and things feel like they’re com­ing together. I just had the thought… I can’t deserve much of this. Things shouldn’t be this good.

I’ve been real­iz­ing lately there’s this dichotomy in how I see myself — on one hand, I have a very outside-in view of myself, painfully aware of oth­ers’ per­cep­tions of myself and always try­ing hard to do things that cre­ate a pol­ished image (see: Ennea­gram 3, of which I’m becom­ing increas­ingly con­vinced of). I can expe­ri­ence myself as a high-performer, a com­pas­sion­ate human, and gen­er­ally rad dude.

Then there’s the other part of myself that’s pretty painfully aware of my flaws and short­com­ings. It knows my hid­ing places and how often I can retreat to them… the places in myself that I expe­ri­ence fears and insecurities.

The achiever in me lives in fear of fail­ure, the sense that things can’t always be this good and I can’t enjoy good things because I’m bound to eff things up, or the sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that some­thing cat­a­strophic is around the cor­ner. The hid­den places in me are always wary of being exposed, or wor­ried that I won’t live up to expec­ta­tions (whose?).

The longer I live the more I’m real­iz­ing that these two parts of myself are redeemed by the Gospel. In the Gospel I can acknowl­edge my imposter and bro­ken self. In the Gospel I begin with the fact that I deserved no good gifts, but then I am given some­thing truly Good. It grounds me and hum­bles me, and most of all it allows me to yield and expe­ri­ence gifts for what they are… and allow myself to savor the sig­nif­i­cance of this delight: that I’m sim­ply his son, and he’s a good Father to me.