When You Feel "Screwed Up, Broken, Clingy, and Scared"

Some post-Easter thoughts for those who don't have a "Sunday best" in their repertoire

If you notice a frustrating gap between your most deeply held beliefs and your everyday humanity, fear not. Easter is real.

Jesus and Easter are useless for those who pride themselves in being put together and better-than. But for those with a damaged, confused, insecure, or defeated spirit, there is endless patience, mercy, and real resurrection hope.

A few years ago during Holy Week, I did something that made me feel ashamed. In a dinner conversation with my wife, Patti, I tore another person down with unflattering gossip. When I did this, Patti took my hand and said gently, “Scott, I know you feel hurt. But you shouldn’t have said any of that.”

Patti’s faithful, corrective word revealed a lingering hypocrisy in me. Anyone who has followed my teaching knows I abhor gossip, equating it to pornography of the mouth. Gossip seeks the same cheap thrill that a lustful fantasy seeks—always at another person’s expense. It seeks a sick connection with the listener as it abandons connection with the one talked about. It prefers objectification over commitment, contempt over care, a self-indulgent rush over the costs and inconveniences and messy realities of love. In gossip, covenant grace is deemed useless and bland, and character assassination is deemed righteous and delicious. Gossip gives the talker and willing listeners a rush via the stripping naked of name and reputation. It’s our socially acceptable way to belittle fellow humans in the service of our own ego lust.

Another word for this kind of gossip is “caricature.” Caricature reduces by exaggerating. It seeks to make another person small by inflating that person’s worst feature, moment, or season.

Most of the time, the underbelly of why we caricature others is an unsettledness about ourselves. Stabbing others in the back is bad medicine for a fragile ego. It heals the soul of neither speaker nor listener. Instead, it adds more poison. We take pleasure in belittling others because we feel small, thus making ourselves smaller still.

Patti’s gentle, brave rebuke took me to a sobering place. How can I presume to be a minister of the gospel and a communicator of God’s truth? Having so easily cursed a fellow human being who bears the image of God, dare I use the same mouth to proclaim the blessings of God?

“With [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing…These things ought not be so” (James 3:9–10).

My Darkness, God’s Grace

The incident sounded an alarm in me. It plunged me into self-loathing and self-doubt. Wanting to know the truth while also being afraid of what could be the truth, I asked Patti if she thought I was a fraud. She was the one person in the world with a direct, daily glimpse into what I was feeling and why, and was well-qualified to provide an informed answer.

The one who knows me best agreed that my heart is vulnerable to the corruption of sin, including sins of the tongue. Then, in the same breath, she affirmed my calling to the God who showed up for adulterous David, murderous Paul, and betraying Peter.

Scripture and history reveal that God’s chosen instruments are bent and broken. They are Good Friday people awaiting resurrection. If you have doubts about this, just survey the names and stories from Jesus’s ancestry.

Patti reminded me of the gospel I had preached to others for decades—that (1) we are all busted sinners with no hope besides the mercy of God who has (2) met our need through the life, death, burial, and death-defying resurrection of Jesus.

We are desperately in ruins and mercifully pardoned and redeemed. We are as loved and kept in our lowest moments as we are in our highest moments; in our weakness as we are in our strength; in our sin-sick wretchedness as we are in our image-bearing grandeur; in our sinful selves as we are in our redeemed selves.

“Scott,” she said, “now would be a good time for you to preach the same gospel to yourself that you have preached to others for decades. Yes, you gossiped and that was wrong. But no sin can outrun, outcompete, or outshine the grace of God.”

That’s a paraphrase, but I will always remember the gist.

A few days later on Easter Sunday, I shared openly about my gossip (leaving out names and details—you can DM me for those—just kidding), as well as a theory about why God let it happen a few days before Easter. I think God didn’t stop me from indulging my unclean lips because he wanted me preaching with a limp on Easter. When preachers limp into and out of their pulpits, God tends to do special things in the hearts of those present. But when they hop up there with a strut—turning the pulpit into a pedestal or stage instead of an altar—everyone is weakened.

Every Hour We Need Him

Anne Lamott once said that everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared—especially those who pretend they have it together.

Like Peter, we’re all duplicitous. We confidently proclaim him as “Lord” and pledge in full sincerity to never betray him. Then, we somehow turn around and do so like traitors (Matthew 26:30–35, 69–75). But then, Jesus comes to us as he did to Peter, reaffirming his love, our status as his daughters and sons, and our usefulness as his servants (John 21:15–19).

After failing and wanting to throw in the towel, I received the following affirmation from a friend. Somehow he had gained access to a letter from a father to his self-doubting, struggling son, and he wanted me to have it also:

Dear Son,

I continue to pray for you in the struggles you face. I’ve been so helped as I’ve thought about some of the following things. I don’t want you to ever forget that Moses stuttered and David’s armor didn’t fit and John Mark was rejected by Paul and Hosea’s wife was a prostitute and Amos’s only training for being a prophet was as a fig-tree pruner. Jeremiah struggled with depression and Gideon and Thomas doubted and Jonah ran from God. Abraham failed miserably in lying and so did his child and his grandchild. These are real people who had real failures and real struggles and real inadequacies and real inabilities, and God shook the earth with them. It is not so much from our strength that he draws, but from his invincible might. I am praying that he will give you courage in this quality of his.

I love you, Dad.

Whatever your story and whatever your regrets, I hope you too can be strengthened by these realities.

Because Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again—because Easter happened and is true—your worst moments and seasons don’t get to define you, and they don’t have to immobilize you.

Being humbled into contrition and repentance by your own pornography of the mouth—or perhaps by some other setback or source of shame—might be the beginning of a new, fruit-bearing season for you. Christ not only saves the worst of sinners; he also befriends, bolsters, and deploys them.

Ask Jesus to increase your self-awareness. The sin and corruption we carry is like the tip of an iceberg: so much more that we don’t yet see floats beneath the surface. As Jack Miller famously said, we are worse than we think. But God’s grace is also greater than we ever dreamed it could be:

“Where our sin abounds, God’s grace superabounds” (Romans 5:20-21).

This is Christ’s invitation to walk with a humble limp and loathe our prideful strut. There is no better time than Easter to stop thinking, speaking, and acting as if the biggest problem with the world is other people. There is no better time to befriend our mirrors and retire our microscopes.

Let Christ befriend, bolster, and deploy you. Own the worst in you, then wait in hope for him to resurrect the best in you. And say to your own heart what a caring friend has said to mine many times:

God rolled away the stone on Easter not to let Jesus out, but to let us in.