I Suck At Life

I suck at life.

Sometimes I say this as a way of expressing just how much I am just not a fan of the way I choose to do this whole living thing. I’m not very good at it. I mess up...a lot. In significant ways. Ways I won’t start by admitting on my blog. Sometimes I say it merely because I messed up. Because, well, I’m human and I’m not perfect. This fact bothers me and I will oft come to the conclusion that I suck at life. When the latter is my basis, when I say it just so, I have certain friends who will contradict my assertion before my next breath can be drawn.

But it’s true.

I suck at life.

I don’t mean to be as self-depreciating as it sounds. But then again, I do.

I suck at life. And so do you.

Let’s face it. When it comes to this whole “living” thing, we are giant screwballs. If you’re half the screwball I know myself to be then, for as much as I love you, you suck.

I’m sorry. But it’s true.

Lately, I’ve found myself especially aware of my shortcomings. Engulfed by the pieces of me that aren’t just “human” and therefore imperfect but are also less than adequate, less than decent, less than human. I find myself consumed by all of the pieces of me I hate. And there is much worth that sort of despising. How is it, I wonder, these hideous pieces can be so clearly in the forefront of my mind and still present? Why is it I don’t usher them out of my heart, soul, mind, and life before they continue to destroy the glory I was created in? Why is it I don’t always feel like I can? How is it that sometimes I don’t feel like I want to?

I’ve spent a significant amount of time in Romans 7 with the Apostle Paul lately. For as often the times where I have thought I couldn’t possibly meet the level of discipleship and servitude and absolute surrender of the early church, the more time I spend in my Bible the more I’m realizing most of them, though dedicated beyond my imagination, sucked at life. And they made into the most popular, longest lasting, most often stolen, widest read book the world has ever kown. I figured, despite the inability to reconcile how much I despised the ugliness inside of me, there was safety in numbers and knowing we were all screwballs and I wasn’t the only one who had seriously messed up life, was comforting. Paul was a mess up. He claimed to be the worst of sinners once, (it’s only because he hadn’t yet personally met me I think). But Paul understood my questions and struggle. How much he knew he sucked at life and how much he hated that.

In Romans 7 (starting with verse 14) Paul starts monologue-ing his plight. “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.” How many times I’ve felt like my sin controls me... “I do not understand what I do.” Amen! “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” So often I feel as if the pieces of who I am that I hate the most get to become the things which define me because they are the things I act on... [skipping down to vs 18] “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what it is good, but I cannot carry it out.” Keep preaching Paul, you’re speaking my language... For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.”

You know what that spells? My life. Paul’s struggle. His words defining my life and my struggles. It spells pretty clearly that I suck at life. There’s no doubt about it. A few verses later Paul talks about how his inner being delights in God’s law but that there is a war waging on his mind that makes him a prisoner to sin. That is the recipe of every piece of me that I hate and baked in the oven at 350 for the last, say, 22 years and it has produced a pretty sucky life. One I’m not very good at. One where I never measure up. One where I don’t live in the Spirit who I claim lives in me and I don’t act on the hope I claim to have in Jesus Christ. Instead the sin I so adamantly denounce is the thing I allow to dictate, too often, both my thoughts and my actions. It controls my attitude and steals my joy.

I suck at life.

And so do you. None of us are perfect. So even if you are twice as good at life as me (which isn’t hard), even if you never let anyone down and always wake up and lie down in the hope of the Living Lord and the fruits of the Spirit are oozing from your very being, you probably still suck at life.

What’s funny is that even though I know you suck, the fact I love you will negate my desire to ever see you as a sucky person. Just as the friends who know me and my heart and my shortcomings better than anyone else will stop my declarations of my life of suck-a-tood, so I would probably and most certainly stand in the way of yours. When I see you, I don’t see the fact you suck...love and grace cancel that.

It was a little like a light bulb. Paul cries out at the end of chapter 7: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord!” This gave me some hope. Paul sees a rescuer from this paradoxical life that he sucks at through Christ. And chapter 8 follows off by Paul stating that those who claim Christ find no condemnation.

And I wondered...

I wondered if the love Christ has for me meant that when He looks upon me and the way that I suck at life that His love covers over how much, daily, I let Him down. How can He not just see all that’s wrong? I wonder if Paul spent the whole of two huge chapters in the intense book of Romans talking about grace without ever saying the word. This whole idea that God gives good gifts to children who don’t deserve it. That Jesus looks down and sees His beautiful disaster and chooses to identify me by my beauty rather than my disaster.

I hate that I suck at life.

And I know that this realization comes with the call to allow my sinful nature to have the crap stomped out of it by the Spirit who I must give permission to control me. If Christ is in me, then my body, the one that sucks is dead to sin. I get to be alive in righteousness. The parts of me that suck don’t have to.

“But life is still about surrender.”

It’s been my personal assertion for the last couple of months. A declaration with various levels of understanding and undisclosed implications on this life I suck at.

Life is still about surrender.

I won’t measure up. Because I’m human. But if I’m not my own. If the control isn’t mine to have. If Perfection is given the power to dictate this life that I suck at living...

Oh God! Give me the power to surrender this life I suck at before I can no longer find my way back to you...