The Truth That Sets Me Free

"For we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and men. "

- 1 Corinthians 4:9 

Dear All,

Now I am weeping.

As someone ruthlessly prized self-deprecation and diligently pursued self-improvement, I didn’t know who I am and what I am and how completely corrupted and deplorably incompetent that person is until now.

Ever since adolescence I vowed to never settle down for anything meaner than true love and uncategorical perfection. I was often painfully and proudly aware that this desire for absolute truth and beauty sets me apart from those around me, be it within my family or at school or later at work. 

But fearing domestic life would destroy love and worse, hinder my development, I took the path of  self-sufficiency that landed me in this literally "no-man’s land" – a childless and marriageless midlife, with no experience of love that requires protection or evidence of perfection which, even if attained, will be lost since I have no children to pass it on.

Like someone who has been keeping digging for a legendary treasure the whole life only to have come to an empty tomb with  worthless trash, I suddenly find my world tumbling down.  The way back is blocked. The way forward is unseen and uncharted.

If only this moment of grace had come two decades earlier when I was young and fearless. Now I am a worn-out middle aged woman, well acquainted with the dangers of the world and deficiencies of myself. I prefer to die and go to heaven to rest from this life’s fruitlessness. I never feared dying as much as living dead. After all, "to die is gain." 

But, this time I have to be cautious for more is at stake than my individual and isolated life and death. Could it be, in an not unlikely but worse scenario, that my remorse is nothing but a virtual signaling façade paraded by the inner coward to excuse myself from the much harder mission of persisting, esp. now that things have been pretty ruined up and looked ever more hopeless?

What if this is part of a test from God, the only one that is true and beautiful, and my capitulation now only serves to reinforce the counterstrategy by the Devil to frustrate God's plan to prepare me for something really good? After all, God knew all along who and what I am, what grotesque follies I am capable and guilty of and still chose to pick me.

I thought of Apostle Paul, who was Saul until the life-altering encounter with the Lord, on the road to Damascus. 

In his blindness, this Hebrew of Hebrews, this Pharisee with an impeccable pedigree and insurmountable zeal, "saw" for the first time without any shadow that all that he had gained was indeed loss and what he valued merely "garbage" and that he was the worst of sinners, persecuting the very Lord he loved and thought he was serving.  How unbearably painful and horrible that revelation must have been? It would have seemed a more merciful treatment had God slained him on the spot.

But, alas, thanks to God that he didn't. Saul became Paul and the Apostle to the Gentiles, who spent the rest of his life, preaching the terrible news of the futility of worldly wisdom and works and the incredible message of faith as the only remedy. 

Two thousand years later, here I am, in the wilderness of my life, stripped of my youth, my social network, my privileged prospect as a successful professional.

Although one might say that I still have a lot more compared with many people about which I am most of the time grateful and sometimes uneasy, that knowledge doesn’t comfort me now that I am deeply and painfully conscious that I am not living up to my potentials and have abused so many of God’s gifts.

I am short of the glory of God’s creation of me.

Compared with what I should be and could have been, I am naked and poor and worthless.

Never have I felt more desperately the necessity of put on the armor of FAITH.

Faith has always been elusive and almost become a myth to me. After all, few have got any as tiny as a mustard seed. 

But now, surprisingly, when I fully realized my own nakedness, and utter poverty in spirit, immediately and almost without any efforts by myself, I sensed the weight of faith.

That God doesn’t give me up and therefore I shouldn’t give God up.