Daily Lesson for May 6, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 86 verse 11:

Teach me your way, O Lord,
that I may walk in your truth;
unite my heart to fear your name.

Some years ago I was talking with a friend who was struggling with temptation. He was feeling very bad about himself, frustrated and ashamed that he could not seem to shake his desires. He told me that he didn't want to think that he might still be struggling with it six months or six years from now. He said he didn't want to be like the alcoholic who never stops saying, "I'm an alcoholic."

I told my friend that to expect to shake himself of his struggle by sheer force of will was a prescription for failure, frustration, and ultimately  the death of his own soul. We cannot will ourselves to wholeness, I told him.  The transformation of desire is a gift from God, and the gift must be left up to God.

What I tried to get my friend to see is something I learned from Richard Rohr, years ago: that we are not our thoughts. Thoughts and desires inevitably arise. To try to fit them with sheer will power simply will not work. What we are to do instead is notice them, observe them, and allow them to pass through us. We are not our thoughts and we are not our desires; and we will not have to act on all our impulses. The thought that we inevitably will and therefore must somehow purify ourselves complete usually ends in repressed desires which have a tendency to either slip out in self-destructive ways, or to be something we project onto others with the thought that we are fighting the good fight against their sin while in fact what we're really trying to do is hide our own.  In either case, ultimately our own sin finds us out; and usually that is in fact a gift from God.

Unity of heart and mind is not something we can will ourselves to achieve. It is a gift from God.  This means it is something we are to wait upon and be grateful for.  But it is not something we can demand of ourselves; that kind of purity is a taskmaster that will inevitably destroy us or lead us to destroy somebody else.

"My name is So-and-so and I'm an alcoholic."  That is an admission of imperfection. But as Brene Brown has written, there is a "gift of imperfection".  And that gift is the grace of knowing that God isn't done with us yet . . .