Just As Ugly

I've learned something recently.

It would be easy to just state plainly the lesson that God has taught me but I'm afraid you'd miss the beauty of the work God is doing in my heart. So here's the story behind the lesson.

I was born in 1973...no, I'm not going to go that far back, although I could. It really does start there. Seriously, I grew up good. I was a good kid. I liked being good. I hated the feeling of being bad. People said I was good. Not other kids, they just said I was a nerd. Which of course meant that they thought I was a good kid. I believed in God, in Jesus, in what He did for me on the cross. I was good. I even believed that I was a sinner and needed God's forgiveness. Wasn't I good? I sure thought so, but I was humble about it.

That was my childhood. At this point in my life, I am not proud of my "good" childhood, I am grateful to God for the gift of my "good" childhood. I can see very clearly now that I was not a good kid because I was good, but because God was good and saw fit, for whatever reason, to protect me from myself as I was growing up.

You see, after my "good" childhood came adulthood. In college, I hung on to my goodness with all of my might. And then came relationships, marriage, mother-hood. Oh, how I clung to my goodness. Little by little, though, God was allowing me to see the truth. I refused to look for awhile. I preferred to see myself in comparison, rather than in honesty. That way I could play the innocent victim role. I even became good at it. But God was persistent. Gentle but persistent.

I found myself up to my eyeballs in the wreckage of someone else's sin. And that's where God let me finally see my own. And you know what? It didn't look any better.

I'm forgiven and I finally have an understanding of just what He's forgiven.

And I have forgiven, because my sin is really just as ugly and detestable as anyone else's.

And if you're reading this and you know me, if you think I'm a good person please understand one thing. That's not me, that's God's grace.

Romans 3 :9-20