Chaplain's Corner

Last fall, my son, my wife and I were working on a building project in my son’s backyard.  We were putting a roof of the grandkids play structure.  I had pulled my car up beside the play structure so that we could access the tools I had brought for the job and our three grandsons were playing in the car.  The lights were blinking, the horn was honking; they were in and out having a great time. 

We had a wet face cloth at the job site to wipe hands and as we worked my oldest grandson decided that Grampa’s car needed a good wash.  That began a precious endeavor as he ran from the faucet wetting the face cloth, to the car, wiping down each part.  He worked on it for quite some time and he was thorough.  Even the rear view mirror received his attention. 

Later that evening, as we drove home I couldn’t help but laugh.  My windows were quite smudged, my mirrors were all out of wack and I noted to my wife that it looked as if I would need to wash the car soon. My grandson’s efforts to wash Grampa’s car were precious.  He worked so hard, he did his best but the fact was that the car was a mess.  As I enjoyed his heart and its desire to bless his Grampa, I realized that the best part of my life; I have been engaged in the same kind of efforts.

I reflected on the many times that I had the best intentions, and gave my best to a task and the result was frankly just one more mess that someone else had to come along and clean up.  My life’s history is punctuated by too many of these kinds of events.  When I was about 10 years old, I decided one summer afternoon that I was going to organize my mother’s pantry.  We lived in an old farm house just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  The ceilings were high and the shelves in the pantry reached to the ceiling. In order to do this organizing that I wanted to do to “help my mom”, I had to stand on the counter and on my tiptoes reach to the top shelf which I could hardly reach.  Imagine the scene:  a ten year old boy, standing on tippy toes on the counter of this old farm house pantry, trying to remove a glass gallon jar of flour from that top shelf when the inevitable happens; the jar slips from his fingers, the jar shatters on the floor below and flour spreads throughout the pantry and out into the kitchen.

I had the best of intentions, I wanted to bless my mother, I believed that a reorganized pantry would help but the result of those efforts was a clean up job that took over two hours, a broken jar and lost flour, but perhaps the most serious loss was in that little boys heart, for he left that scene, broken and defeated and feeling like even his best intentions and hardest work resulted in nothing short of disaster. 

Similar scenes with similar results would happen with sufficient frequency in my life to leave me with an innate sense of being nothing but a failure.  At 55 I have come to recognize the origins of these feelings, I have worked with therapists to seek to dislodge those feelings and I can live most days out from under the dark cloud of failure that I can so easily have form over my head.   But it takes very little to bring me back to that moment in the farm house pantry where I stood ashamed before my mother, not for some rebellion I had chosen, but for failing so completely at trying to do something that I believed would be such a blessing to my mom.

I saw my grandson the next day, thanked him for working so hard on washing my car and my wife give him a toonie as a reward for his hard work.  Some of you will say, “The boy doesn’t deserve to be paid for a poor job.”  My response is, “The boy needs to be honored for the goodness of his intentions and thanked for the considerable effort that he expended to bless his grandpa.”

In my work, I rub shoulders with patients and residents and staff members who have had their spirits wounded as a result of failing to do the good they intended.  I rub shoulders with some who cringe, at anything that even comes close to criticism, because their spirit feels so thoroughly flawed, so deeply incapable of doing anything that others would judge to be acceptable, that it is nothing short of a miracle that they can even function.  In some the sense of absolute failure is so deep that they even believe that the aches and pains of life are somehow directly connected to some failure, even though when the matter is discussed they can not imagine what the failure might have been. 

I understand that the origins of such a disposition sometimes come from the teachings of the church.   One of the theological concepts that come clearly from the pages of the Christian Scriptures is that of depravity.  The Bible teaches that “there is no one righteous, not even one…all have turned away (from God), they have become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one…”  These words come from St. Paul’s grand letter to the Roman church.  The come in the opening chapters as Paul develops the argument that we need to stop trying to accomplish the impossible – that is to please God with our own goodness – so that we can accept by faith God’s provision for our salvation through Jesus Christ..

But as so often happens, Christians get stuck on the wrong part of the story and forget the finish.  When we get stuck feeling that we are altogether worthless, even after receiving God’s grace and becoming God’s child we can remain locked in those feelings of worthlessness.  Believe me I speak from years of painful experience.  My choice to bless my grandson for washing my car, was an act that had two intentions: first, it was a choice to pass on to my grandson a different legacy that the one I received.  A legacy of blessing, of appreciation, of gratitude that would encourage him to cultivate those desires he had to help others that led him to wash my car.  And second, it was a choice to say “no” to those haunting voices in my soul that seem capable of saying but one thing, “See, there you go again, even when you try to do something good, you fail.  You are nothing but a failure.”

I know without a shadow of a doubt that many who read these words will feel the pain of identification.  Simply telling a bit of my story and reflecting on its impact in my life will give opportunity to your own inner voices to begin their insidious whisper, “You know, you are just like this Larry fellow, even when you try to do something good, you just blow it.  You are nothing but a failure.”

Part of the spiritual work that I do in my own life and that I seek to help others with is to understand that this biblical truth of depravity has a singular end: to convince you and I that we need God’s grace that he offers us in love through Jesus Christ.  The truth of depravity is not intended to scar our souls so deeply that we conclude that we are always and forever, even in our most sincere and gracious attempts to bless others, nothing more than failures.

Close your eyes for a moment, and instead of visualizing your Mom or Dad or whoever it was in your life that left you feeling like a failure no matter what you did; image God our Father saying, “Thank you, I saw your heart, I know your intentions, I recognize how much you wanted to bless and I am blessed by that.  I love you and because I am in your life, you are no longer nothing but a failure.  Now you possess the power to bless others as I have blessed you.”