Intro and Essay

Hello STEEM, I am Nicodemas's friend. I am posting this writing on his behalf. I have encouraged my friend Nic to post his awesome photography here. I started this account in hopes he would do the rest on my last failed attempt to get him on STEEM. After no luck, I gave up until this week Nic told me he started writing on the behest of his mentors and close friends. I was ecstatic when he mentioned I could post it on "that blogging site" I use.
So this will be his informal introduction and hopefully his first of many posts as I try to encourage him to send me more writings. My friend is going through some dark times, he has asked me not to tell him how or what happens to the post as he needs to concentrate on more important things. This writing is his therapy so he would like to focus on recovery and not a new project to distract him. As you will see he is also a very talented writer in addition to his photography. Please write some encouraging words for my friend. I will monitor it for him till he is ready to join STEEM down the road. Thank you.
-@alaqrab
PS: I get to include a picture he graciously let me pick from a shared album he sent me. I think my nagging might be working

Why can’t I accept God’s love and forgiveness?
By Nicodemas

First, a preamble.

I hate writing. I believe this is largely due to having an incredibly short attention span as well as a deep streak of perfectionism. This particular set of character defects works in tandem to frustrate my efforts well before I ever touch a keyboard. Upon even thinking about putting ideas to page, I am easily overwhelmed and put out, as I have no simple or effective means of getting it done both right and quickly. However, C.S. Lewis said “I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” I don’t understand, have never understood, the nature of God’s grace, His love or His forgiveness, let alone how to accept and apply it in my life. My sincere desire is to uncover some sort of new insight or epiphany through the discipline of meticulously ordering my thoughts in a linear, coherent and shareable fashion, that will ultimately lead to a new way of life in the alleged freedom God’s grace seems to promise those who can accept such a gift. So, at the behest of smarter people than myself, I am about to attempt committing one of my deepest struggles to the written word anyway.

“Do you believe that the God of Jesus loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity—that he loves you in the morning sun and in the evening rain—that he loves you when your intellect denies it, your emotions refuse it, your whole being rejects it? Do you believe that God loves without condition or reservation and loves you this moment, as you are and not as you should be?”
Brennan Manning, All is Grace

Pretty words and lovely sentiment but, while I really want to buy what Brennan is selling, I just can’t do it.

To use some of his words, my whole being rejects it because, like many others staring down the barrel of these same questions, I am deeply and intimately acquainted with the horrors of my own transgressions. It seems as though every moment of every day I am inundated by the deluge of harms and hurts my sin has caused everyone in my purview. I have been too arrogant, too selfish, too harsh, too stubborn and too judgmental. I have been brutally condescending and incredibly childish. I have been lustful and depraved, dishonest and devious. I have manipulated, envied, controlled, neglected, or scorned nearly every single person in my life. I have glutted my appetites, trampled upon the ones I love most, deified my intellect and prioritized my comforts over my relationships. I have been a thief, a liar, a gossip, a fornicator, an addict and a narcissist. My words have been corrosive; my thoughts, diabolical. My heart has been evil, and it has been ugly.

As I look back on my past through the eyes of this newfound conviction, the consequences of these sins litter my history like a winter’s worth of highway trash laid bare in the springtime melt. Childhood peers and classmates who shunned me because of my flaws and mistakes. Countless acquaintances who encountered my hubris and chose active disengagement or avoidance upon first impressions. Coworkers and colleagues, tentatively constrained by varying degrees of professionalism, who tolerated my presence while in earshot but commiserated over my inadequacies and shortcomings in the relative social safety of my absence. Friends and family, both immediate and extended, who strove to remain in my orbit only to be emotionally bludgeoned by my insensitivity, immaturity and brutality. My wife…

I am often daily, even hourly confronted by the damage I have done to her. How my horrible choices left her with such feelings of loneliness, hurt, rejection and sorrow. How my arrogance and selfishness made her feel small and insignificant. How my fear and unwillingness to confront the addictions and escapes in my life caused her to feel unloved and unworthy. How my judgmental and critical words lacerated her soul, leaving deep, permanent wounds on her heart. Never in my life could I have imagined how enormous my aptitude for wickedness truly is, and I constantly find myself immobilized by the enormity of my crimes.
Thus, the underlying messages woven through the tapestry of my defects and destruction say I am unlovable and unwanted, unfit for relationship and undeserving of affection; that I am filthy rags, unworthy of consideration and unvalued as a human being. They tell me I am never enough: good enough, smart enough, brave enough, kind enough, successful enough, healthy or wealthy enough. They label me a failure, a fraud, a coward and a bum, and they seem inescapable.

That hasn’t stopped me from trying, though.

The apostle John says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9) I have both confessed and repented, and continue to do so routinely. I press into submission on a daily basis; imperfectly, but with fervor. Having done these things, I can tell you I don’t feel forgiven. I don’t feel cleansed. Instead, I still feel guilty and ashamed. While I have been told that feelings are a horrible indicator of where I stand with God at any given moment, I am still waiting, I think, to be liberated from my self-imposed bondage by some sort of emotional impression from Him that tells me He’s here and He cares. I believe I need this personally felt assurance from God in order to be rescued from my current dogma of self-deprecation. A peaceful stilling of the soul, a comfort in the heart; any tangible indicator that what God has said about me, my sin and His grace and forgiveness is true even for me. It hasn’t yet come, and that has led me to believe it may never happen if it hasn’t by now.

As such I remain imprisoned, chained to the wall of my overwhelming sin by shackles of toxic shame and self-loathing, endlessly inviting The Accuser to lambast me with the excruciating minutiae of my every harm and hurt. He tells me that I can’t simply walk away from the destruction I’ve caused just because I’m “forgiven.” I did bad things, very bad things, and I need to be punished. I need to carry that weight like a stone around my neck for the rest of my life, because I’m a terrible person and deserve the misery. Lyrics from an old Casting Crowns song come to mind:

But the giant's calling out my name
And he laughs at me
Reminding me of all the times
I've tried before and failed
The giant keeps on telling me
Time and time again. "Boy you'll never win!"
"You'll never win!"

Man, how many times have I heard that laugh? So mocking, so confident, so absolute. “You’ll never win.”
Even so, I persist. I have stumbled, gotten up, stumbled again & gotten up again. I rage, stall, struggle, fight, argue, plead, yell and weep my way through surrendering my sins and my defects in the astigmatic and desperate hope that God is going to still do something with me that will be better than this. It is that hope which drives me to make small decisions, consciously and unconsciously, to “turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand Him.” (AA step 3)

What I have heard lately from the people in my life regarding God’s grace is that I need to choose, and the feelings will follow. Trust is a choice. Belief is a choice. Love is definitely a choice. The love and forgiveness of God, promised all throughout the scriptures, is being freely given, but I must choose to accept it; I can’t simply wait to have it conferred upon me with feels and fireworks. Psalm 119:30 says “I have chosen the way of faithfulness. I set your rules before me.” This passage is delightfully free of verbal clutter and says nothing about feelings; instead, the Psalmist is speaking in terms of action. He appears to be making a choice and even putting reminders of what he chose and why he chose it in front of him in order to affirm his decisions. This seems to indicate that the path to experiencing forgiveness, of understanding God’s grace, might not necessarily start with feeling that experience or understanding. It might begin with a choice to walk that path and find those feelings along the way.

Simple as that idea may be, it’s definitely not easy, at least not for me. In fact, it sounds both impossible and terrifying. “Just make a choice? That’s it?? Can’t be. I don’t believe it.” To me, “simply” choosing to believe I am loved and forgiven by God feels like a form of intentionally avoiding both my feelings and my responsibilities. I did bad things, remember? Things society would say make me a bad person. I owe it to the people I harmed to feel bad about it, don’t I? It’s penance for being such a raging douche canoe my entire life, isn’t it?

But if that’s true, then for how long? Until they forgive me? I’m certainly not going to get forgiveness from everyone I’ve harmed, even as I work through the drudgery of actively seeking amends. So what, then? Am I just supposed to feel like a monster for the rest of my days? That can’t be right either; even I know there’s no life in that. I have to believe that eventually, even as desperate as I am for the approval of others, I would come to a point where I tell “society” to pound sand; that I’m just plain done with carrying the shame. So what will bring me to that seemingly arbitrary decision?

My best guess? Fatigue. Spiritually speaking, if I carry that weight long enough then something’s going to give eventually. I am slowly, dimly becoming aware that God is going to let me carry this until I can’t anymore. I have to believe that somewhere along the path He’s carved out for me is the place where I just can’t take another step with this weight on my shoulders. A place where I arrive with shaking arms, trembling legs and an aching back to toss this loathsome load to the ground with explosive vituperation and drop to my knees in absolute exhaustion, because I just can’t carry it anymore. I think that, when I finally look up again, I will see that the horrible burden I’ve hefted for so long landed right at the feet of Jesus.

In that moment, my heart wants to believe that as I continue to lift my head I will finally see His face, and it will be utterly consumed by His radiant, tear streaked smile as He effortlessly heaves that horrible mountain of shame and fear and doubt and self-loathing into the depths of the deepest ocean, never again to be known or remembered for all of eternity. Afterwards, as He claps the dust from His hands and wraps me in His perfect embrace, my heart wants to believe I will finally. Be. Free.
But I am not there yet.

I weep as I write this. I stare out from a prison of my own making at this picture I’ve painted from God’s own truth, yearning so desperately for that freedom but remaining steadfastly convinced it’s just not meant for me. Even though I know the door to my cell is open, I still won’t walk through it. This is madness. I now know He will take it, if I will just give it to Him. So now the question is no longer why, it’s when.

When will I choose to listen, and believe the Voice of truth?