Someone asked me a few months ago, where I get my sense of validation. I pondered it and prayed about it and it came to me.
Performance. And I can be all-or-nothing about it.
Which is why on some level, I am always observing myself and measuring to see if I live up to my image of what a Christ-follower should be like.
It’s why I find it so distressing to have someone suggest that there is some way of being that I am not. For so long I have had the self-preoccupied question on my mind: How am I doing?
The problem is there is no non-crazy-making way to answer that question. The search for some ultimate validation is futile. It of course, never comes.
Radical abandonment, scandalous grace, lavish love…when it’s an ideal I try to live up to only leads to feeling like a failure. It makes my life about pursuing self-actualization which in the end is just another symptom of the self-life. (see last post).
So, when I wake up in the morning every day and consider what it means to put on the armor of God. It’s hearing the voice that tells me that:
My own efforts to fix, solve and make progress in my spiritual life are not solutions but a symptom of the problem.
Trying to live by an abstract norm will ultimately fail and may even cause damage.
It has never about my performance, but His.
