Beautifully Helpless

I am beautifully helpless.

I'll recap one of my days in the last week for you: 

I spent the morning psyching myself up, taking my medicine to be able to functionally work an eight-hour shift running cars for the valet company. Needless to say, the prospect of working this in a mid-forties temperature was not the most pleasurable prospect I have ever prospected.

However, the work day was good. The Lord made Himself sensibly near to me. He sustained the faint of heart. My God is good like that.

But there was a problem: I haven't taken the wide open opportunity (multiple times) to share the gospel with a friend of mine who I interact with on a daily basis. My God is good, and He also wants others to taste His goodness. Because He is good and wants others to taste His goodness, I spent most of the day in the conviction of my lack of boldness, thinking about what I should say to this person.

I drew many, many blanks that day.

But the Lord is good.

Finally, my time had come.

I bumbled my way through the entire thing. I tried to talk about how sin separates us from God and how without trusting our helplessness to His sacrifice on our behalf, we won't have any lasting hope to get out of bed in the morning.

Now, just add about ten minutes of jumbled, muddled, and confused words, and you will have construed most of my gospel presentation.

As the friend left to head home, I sat in my car thinking about where I was: I'm in the Midwest, a familiar stranger to this Minneapolis town, still very much attempting to find my own way having been separated from most of what I know and am comfortable with at home. I thought about how I wanted to testify to the hope that is in me, but probably couldn't have presented anything much more unclearly.

Also, it was pitch black outside, and bun-numbingly cold.

Oh yeah. And my gas light had just turned on.

And I probably just garbled the most important message in the world.

This sad, sad picture belonged in some movie.

Then the song "Who Am I" came on the radio.

The Lord is good, and very near to me:

I am a flower quickly fading, here today and gone tomorrow, a wave tossed in the ocean, a vapor in the wind. Still, You hear me when I'm calling. Lord, You catch me when I'm falling, and You've told me who I am. I am Yours.

I started laughing out loud, and I know I looked like an idiot. A fool for Christ, I hope they say. But I was overcome with the beautiful helplessness of my situation. I have nothing. I attempted to share what hope I have been given, and I don't think I did a great job. But yet, He tells me who I am.

I am His.

He never lets go, through the calm, and through the storm! I drove home that night feeling pretty OK about my helplessness.

Sure, I've got a lot of decisions to make in the next few weeks. Sure, life isn't easy. Sure, obedience isn't always the most enjoyable of the options, but I can tell you this in dead-certainty:

I've never felt so upheld by the hand of God in my life, and there is nothing like it.

I believe that beauty is found in anything that points to a greater reality than our own limited one. I see my daily helplessness as doing just that. I have no feet of my own to stand on. But The Architect of the universe is daily laying the next panel of metal on this suspension bridge of my life. I can only pray for the strength to take the very next step, and no more than that which He has laid before me, else I fall to my peril on the jagged rocks of pompous anxiety and foundationless self-confidence.

He truly does provide only today's grace, today. Tomorrow's grace will come tomorrow.

In my opinion, that is some of the most beautiful helplessness I could think to have.

The Lord is good.

The Lord near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18).

He is my hope.

.DSN.