... introspection

have you ever felt like everything you do is letting someone down, somewhere?

anyone who knows me will tell you about me that i have a great memory for some things and a crap memory for others. i'm good with movie stars in movies (six degrees of kevin bacon is a fave of mine) and hopeless with dates. on your birthday, i will wake up with a vague sense of unease, thinking there's something i should be doing today, a phone call i should be making, someone i need to be talking to.

i felt like that a couple of weeks ago, contacted someone to work out what i was forgetting, and upset someone in the doing of that. all because my memory is crap and i am a tool who doesn't organise life more effectively around myself. i know my memory is crap. i did have an external memory i was using, but it turned out to be crap as well and got fried. all data lost. and i am a tool once again.

something else that happened to me recently is that i was asked how i became a Christian. it's a long story, and the more often i tell it, the less i think of myself. i don't know why that is. i am certainly amazed every day that God has brought me into a relationship with him and, while i continue every day to make stupid mistakes & errors of judgement and in more ways than i care to think of let him down, he continues to save me from myself and shows me that i am not my own - i am his, and nothing i or anyone else can do will ever change that.

i'm not particularly keen on having my book read out at the last day - is anyone? - but one page will read something like, "september 1990, repented and prayed for forgiveness, entered the Kingdom of God, got out of the bath and dried off and got dressed. eventually stopped crying." that is the day God saved me from myself. every day since he has been keeping me from trying to take control back and metaphorically smearing the walls of his new temple with my own crap.

i commented at the end of my testimony that it never really leaves you, the option of suicide. it's like learning all of a sudden about control-alt-delete. "oh my goodness, my computer isn't doing what i want it to do, maybe i should just hit ctrl-alt-del and start over...?" except it isn't. the problem is that without having someone operate on my brain, i don't see how i can unlearn it. i've asked God to help me unlearn a lot of stuff, but never that. i suppose, in a way, it's my escape clause in our little covenant - that if the going gets too hot, i might pull the plug. every time i've sat down to seriously consider it since that day in 1990, i've stayed my hand because of God's love for me. perhaps, then, the button still looks like it's there, but God's pulled out the wiring underneath.

he has surrounded me with friends and family - blood and spiritual - who continue to be an encouragement and reminder to me that God's love, and the poor copy we share, is so much more than the things we struggle against in our lives. i let people down, and surely the only thing that enables them to forgive me (if/when they do) is the love that God has put in their hearts.

thank you, God, for that.