I hate my flaws.
I hate having them, hate seeing them, and the work of hiding them.
But life seems to breed the issues I'm so eager to conceal, as though every day is a walk through a thorn bush wearing a pale silk dress. I just want to make it through the day with my clothing in one piece, but the environment makes that impossible. Of course I'll lie down at the end of the day bloodied and scraped with rips and tears. But why do so many other people around me seem to reach their beds unscathed? Is it something wrong with me?
So I'll stay awake late into the night, needle and thread hacking my frayed dress back together. Because what if they see? I can't let them see the holes. Because that's the message out there: You must not be flawed. Why else do more than a million people a year inject Botox into their aging cheeks? People flash white smiles and don't talk about their teeth whiteners, just like magicians don't reveal their secrets.
That's what we want. We want The Secret. That Secret I pretend to know while I'm stitching my shredded dress. We may be adults now, but we still play Pretend. All we did is sophisticate the rules. We're told that we should not be flawed, so we strut like we aren't, lest they all see the patches.
We lie to each other. We go to lavish lengths to prove to others, and ourselves, how "good" things are. We tell each other about all the good things we have, like our money or our wives or our children or our beachside cottage. And we genuinely believe that satisfaction comes in these forms. Yet even those who have all that lie down at night with holes to patch. And worse, the patches ravel: divorces, death and bankrupcy... We don't have enough fingers to plug the dam.
Oh, what we would give to be whole.
Isn't that what drives us? Isn't that what all this frenetic boasting and American Dream-ing is all about? The holes of our brokenness throb to be filled, so we seek to find what fills them. We seek wholeness and contentment.
But with all our effort there's still a draft, still a leak. We remain unfixed and disrepaired.
An ancient fable tells us that demons are fallen angels. Man is described as "fallen" as well. And wherever we started from, falling into the thorn bush means something was broken. What good is a patch for my bruise when the bleeding is internal?
Here's the paradox that comes with healing and wholeness: I must admit to my tears and breaks, and admit that I cannot fix them. Physically, what else is a doctor's visit? After 3 days of limping around on a broken ankle insisting that "I'm fine", I will have to reach a point where I admit that my body is broken and that I cannot fix it myself. That principle translates spiritually.
We don't like that. We want to fix ourselves. We want to own our wholeness with pride, because everyone else seems to have it. But everyone who struts is lying, and at the bottom line it just doesn't work that way. An engine cannot fix itself - there has to be a mechanic.
What a terrifying thought to people who think that they themselves are their only hope, to sit on their broken ankle with no doctor to go to.
The God called Yahweh claims to be a jack-of-all-trades, the key to that wholeness our souls cramp hungrily for. If He had a truck, he would have everything from bolts of cloth to bags of concrete in the back. And when we admit that we cannot fix ourselves, He claims to be the one who can. I picture Him wearing a leather jacket and having grease-stains on His hands from all the work He does.
He'll wait for me to call before He comes. And when I show Him the muddied bloodied tatters of my thorn-wrenched dress, He trades it for a beautiful new one. Because wholeness isn't patching the rags I have.
It's admitting I need to be given something new.
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