I am filled with a swirling darkness…
(Your compassion never runs out)
I am consumed with red hot sin…
(Your love never fails me)
I think I’ve tried to push Your hand away
because I think that I deserve abandonment…
I feel like I’m not worth Your time
(sometimes)…
But I’ve seen Your grace wash across
the face of this earth;
I’ve felt Your grace course through
my veins.
You take compassion on the very least.
You lift the head of the weary.
(You carry my broken frame before
the Cross and bury my shame
in the same dirt that absorbed
Your blood…)
-C.R.
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I must confess that I’ve often felt this way. A dark, endless feeling of inadequacy. A certainty, deep in my gut, that I’m not worth anyone’s time, much less God’s. The above poem was born from reflecting on that feeling…
I’m not alone in this, right? It’s not just me, is it?
Sometimes I chase my fear in so many circles that I get dizzy; I feel sick at how incredibly, cripplingly inept I am…
You’ve felt this too, right?
When this darkness overtakes me and I feel like I’m going to be swallowed whole, sometimes the Spirit brings to mind some folks who have gone before me.
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I think that Peter probably felt inadequate when he sank into that water, looking away from the One who called him out. Or when he remembered refusing (at first) to let Jesus wash his feet. Or in his later days when he looked back on the day that he denied Christ three times. “What a screw up”, he probably thought.
I think Thomas felt inadequate because he doubted so much. He didn’t want to believe that Jesus had come back from the dead. He said he would only believe if he saw the holes in His palms. “Why do I doubt the Son of God?” he likely thought.
I think Matthew might have felt inadequate because of his past as a hated tax collector. A traitor, a hypocrite, a pariah. His own people would have looked upon him with derision. He was probably haunted by that stigma every day of his life. “I’m not worth His time,” he might have thought.
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Much of my time has been spent running from my past, running from the nagging blight of feeling useless, tainted, scarred…
But I know that God’s hand reaches for me, even through my darkness. He’s never too far that I can’t reach Him.
His compassion extends from the highest to the lowest. There’s this great album title from the band As Cities Burn: “Son, I Loved You At Your Darkest”. It brings to mind Romans 5:8: “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
No matter how I feel, no matter what wells up inside of me, God is constantly, consistently loving me. And when I think about what my darkest times have been and I think about the fact that He has stuck with me, I’m awestruck. I’ve known few people in my life that showed true, unconditional love. We humans are not automatically wired to be selfless and forgiving.
But that’s all that God is: true, unabashed, unconditional love. And even when I’m at my darkest and I feel like an worthless lump of flesh, He’s there. He’s always there.
You’ve felt that before, right?
C. R. Leverette 