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God Sees Everything, Including the Blind |
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05/29/2011 - by Chuck Monan, Preaching Minister
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
~ 1 Cor. 6:9-11
Our world’s tendency to downplay the seriousness of sin and its consequences is nothing more than a sad denial of a reality we find too painful to face. Sometimes, though, truth breaks through in such a burst of light and heat that we are no longer able to deny it. David Carr’s The Night of the Gun is such a moment.
My story is charming or horrifying, depending on which part of it you focused on. If I told you I was a drug addict who sobered up, got custody of his kids, got them off welfare, survived cancer, and went on to become a columnist for The New York Times, would you like my story? You bet.
What if I told you I was a fat thug who sold drugs, beat up women, terrorized children? Then maybe not so much. How did that really happen? How did that guy become this guy? Junkies as a matter of course they don’t put things in boxes, they wear them on their head. The stories that we tell about ourselves are designed to sort of reveal a part of ourselves to the world. It’s the part we want to show. What I learned from two years of reporting, investigation and writing is that you can’t know the whole truth -- but if there is one, it lies in the space between people.
~ David Carr
The Night of the Gun is a brutally honest look backward at a life that nearly all will find shocking and horrifying. Carr is unflinchingly honest in chronicling the selfish, abusive, irresponsible actions that filled years of his life. He is less interested in portraying himself in a positive light than he is in getting at the truth about who he was and what he did.
Would that the church was such a place.
How often do we obsess over portraying the perfect image of ourselves? People with perfect marriages, perfect families, perfect relationships, perfect careers, perfect spiritual lives ... This façade is a lie and we know it, yet we keep pretending that it’s not.
Carr titles one chapter “God Sees Everything, Including the Blind.” That’s a pretty good description of us when we trade transparency for theatrics. In addressing the Corinthians Paul reminded them “Such were some of you ...” What would our list look like?
God indeed sees everything. He also forgives and changes us ... provided we stop playing games about not needing any help.
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