O, Woe is Me! Where are You now, God?

"No one is good, not even one"

I have always had a harsh opinion of myself. They say that we are always our harshest critic. It's funny, a co-worker of mine pointed out that I'm always telling people that they need to stop hating themselves but in reality I hate myself more than I hate anyone else. Why?

"The front pages of papers of children raped by rapist
Iraqi torture chambers and we the blame claim we're blameless
Wrong, all"

True, I'm not a rapist, nor a murder, nor the kind of person who should be locked away in an asylum. I'm human. Humans, evolutionarily I'm inclined to believe that we're programmed to think there is something wrong with us so we can strive to become better than what we are. It's like a diagnostic program that runs in the background of your computer trying to find all the things that are slowing it down; in reality the diagnostic program itself is probably the most CPU-consuming program. But on a spiritual level, I believe the damage to our soul is reflected in our physical bodies. I personally believe that I am racked with guilt over sins I've committed and thus I hate myself; that is why I smoke.

"And swelling up inside of us there's this pride in us, this arrogance
And our only line of defense is the sense that
I'm not as half as bad as this friend of mine so I must be fine"

But everybody smokes at one time or another, right? I mean, it's not like I smoke pot or get drunk. As if I could put qualifiers on what makes me better than someone else, now that's a load of bologna. James 2:10 tells us that any and all sin condemns us. None of us can point a finger without also convicting ourselves.

"We mean well, don't we?
Yet I've never seen good intentions set a man free from
Hurt, all"

Being a kind person does not solve the problem. It goes a long way to making life easier while living it, but it does not solve the problem. Granted, if someone is a genuinely kind person then they're way better off than the 90% who claim to be kind and are really the scum of the Earth. I have every good intention when I am kind to people. I mean well and I mean what I say when I say it. Yet I am still alone and left to my own self-destructive devices at the end of the day.

"This poor unfortunate soul
Filling a single void with toy after toy, girl after boy
How boring- this wasn't this meant to be Humanity's life story
Warring with God saying, 'what have You done for me?'"

So, in my bitter malcontentedness I blame everyone and anyone else, even God for the way I feel. I blame myself and the way I look, the way God made me, as if I am somehow deficient. The truth is much harder to swallow. There is nothing wrong with me. I am not deficient. Nobody is to blame for this except myself, but not for the things I blame myself for. Oh wait...

"Bought, all
Hanging out for six hours, marred beyond recognition
In complete submission to His Father's will, still"

I am a child of God. When I accepted Christ I surrendered all the guilt and shame, the ugliness of sin, to Him. I have a choice now and I don't have to look at life as a predestined promenade of doom. My self-hatred and proceeding self-destructive behavior is for nothing. I don't have to do this anymore.

"A proclamation was made louder than the loudest temptation
With more beauty than all His creation
More eternal than eternity, more angelic than the heavenlies
It Is done for you and bought with blood"

How stupid and foolish to think that I, in my finite understanding, could presume to hang the judgment of the universe over my head when God Almighty doesn't. Who am I to condemn myself for what God has forgiven and forgotten? Where are my accusers now? Who can lay a finger of blame on me with evidence that will hold up in the courts of Final Judgment? He who knit me in my mother's womb has brought about a redemption love story that erases the things that I hated most about myself and given me a completely new identity: child of God.

"Accept
Rejoice
For freedom has come"

Prose titled, "Benediction" written by Jimmy Needham
Accessed October 2nd, 2011 at: LyricsMania