Broken and Unworthy

Those of you who know me know that I'm a thinker. I analyze and over analyze everything, however insignificant it might be. I think this is one of my strengths. I have good problem solving skills. I am able to look at most situations pretty objectively. I am fairly self-aware. I know when I get on other people's nerves. I know when I'm more or less on-target. My analytical mind is a strength, but it is also a weakness. Not everything needs to be analyzed to the extent I analyze it. Sometimes, I choose analysis instead of action.

Recently, though, one of the things I have been analyzing a lot is my attitude and my life. Something on my mind and heart a lot lately is the feeling that I am increasingly less worthy of bearing Christ's name. The more I learn and grow, the more I realize that I can't be who I want to be. I'm broken, incapable, and unworthy. As much as I strive to be holy. As much as I strive to be who God has called me to be, I fail.

I've always had this head knowledge, that I'm messed up and all. That fact was build into my mind as I became a Christian in high school. There was probably never a time in my Chrstian life when I wouldn't have said that I'm unworthy, that I'm sinful, that I fall short, but in the back of my mind I probably would have thought that I was doing pretty well. At this point in my life, right now, I feel like I "get it" so much more than I did just 2 or 3 years ago. I am realizing that Christianity isn't really about half of the things I thought it was about. There was a time when I was pretty caught up in being religious. I said that I was Christian, not religious, but really, well... I was in the business of self-righteous, "do this but not that", sin management with a little grace and faith thrown in for good measure. I thought you could tell who was a Christian by how they dressed, who they hung around with, whether or not they drank alcohol or smoked, etc. Now I don't define Christianity in those terms so much, and I feel a remarkable freedom to be like Jesus without being religious. I found that a lot of things I thought were important probably don't matter all that much to Jesus, and some of the things I put on the back burner are really what are most important... some of those things that are less measurable and not cut and dried. For example, when you define Christianity as doing A, B, and C, and not doing X, Y, and Z, then it's pretty easy to measure who fits that profile and who doesn't. So, whether its right or not, that's how Christianity is often defined. On the other hand, it is a lot more difficult to measure love and grace and a relationship with God, and that's what Christianity is about more than anything else.

The more I grow and the more I learn, the more I feel unworthy and incapable of being who I want to be, who God wants me to be. Many nights as I am laying in bed on my way to lala land I think about the day, and over the last few months I've found myself feeling more and more unworthy--messed up, broken in all sorts of ways, and short of who I want to me. Whether I've had a good day or a bad day, I can usually see pretty clearly a lot of the ways I messed up and could have done better, ways my attitude stunk. I have realized that more often than not, when I've had a bad day, it's not because dramatic life-altering bad things happened. No, it's usually because my attitude was crappy. Granted, sometimes stuff happens that I have no control over, but even then, most of the time my day would have ended up pretty good if I would have reacted with patience, rationality, and some of those other Christian qualities I claim to live by. So the more I learn and grow, the more aware I am that I'm not learning and growing nearly as much as I want or need to. And I want that to change.