All I Need Is Jesus and a Good Pair of Jeans: The Tired Supergirl's Search for Grace (6 page)

So this Samaritan woman, who once avoided everyone, races back to her village, yelling, banging on doors, clutching at people, looking them in the eye, and telling them the good news. Her testimony alone sparks a revival in her town. She is changed. Imagine it. I wonder if guy #6 is sent packing. Mr. Substitution can’t cut it anymore. She has tasted the real thing. She has spent time with God. He knows her mess. And he still wants to hang out with her. He likes her.

And so it is with us supergirls and our quiet longings and empty substitutions. He knows our mess. He knows about the crying and aching and the longing to be full. He knows about the shopping and the overtime at work, the romance novels and the trips to Baskin Robbins. And he still wants to hang out. He really likes us. If we drink in his forgiveness and mercy, we don’t have to be thirsty anymore. We’ve invited him to come in and change our world before, but let’s do it again. It’s just one more trip to the well, but this is no ordinary drink.

I can’t get the chorus to this Bethany Dillon song out of my head. It talks about how Jesus can take a regular day and make it new. That when he enters the picture, everything changes. He sees our hurt and suffering and weeps over it and begins to fashion us into a new person. It’s a praise song. The kind of praise song a supergirl would sing after chatting with God. Instead of eating a bar of chocolate.

7

I SIN A LOT

T
he word
sin
is just so ugly. If I had my choice, I’d rather think about things like Hawaii and buy-one-get-one-free sales. Sin conjures up thoughts of imperfection and wrongdoing. I would rather not dwell on such unpleasantness. I like to think about all the things that I get right. All three and a half of them. I feel very comfortable sharing the non-sinful areas of myself with others. Letting people in on my weaknesses makes me feel vulnerable and weird because they might try to hold me accountable or something. I also like to pretend that other people think I don’t have any sins. Now my family and friends, they know I have a lot of sin, so I can’t pull that one over on them, but I think there are some people in China who think I am sinless. And that makes me feel better about myself.

On the whole, I do pretty good with the Ten Commandments. I have never murdered anyone, and I honor my parents. But it starts getting tricky in the New Testament when Jesus says the two greatest commandments are to love God with all your heart, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. That is so all-encompassing. Loving God with all my strength? I need some of my strength for loving chocolate and shopping. And I don’t know about you, but some of my “neighbors,” the people who surround me in life, are not a bit like me, so how can I be expected to love them like I love myself? Sin has been compared to “missing the mark,” an archery term. If loving God with all my being and loving my neighbor as myself is the bull’s-eye, I tend to miss the mark on a spectacularly regular basis.

I’m not sure how I became aware of all the sin in my life, but the craziest thing is the more I move toward God, the more I am in his presence, the more aware I am of how sinful I am. When God is near, I suddenly realize, “Well, for goodness’ sake, I’ve got a whole lot of sins inside of me.”

And then I want to hunker down and hide behind something, because it is painful to be sinful when God is right there all perfect and holy.

I take after my predecessors Adam and Eve on that fateful day in the Garden of Eden. They polish off the apple and suddenly start looking for some way to cover up what they have just done. They try wearing some leaves, but when God comes strolling through the garden they realize, “Hey, these leaves are just not big enough to cover our shame! Where is that big juniper bush?”

And sadly enough, evergreen foliage does no better at hiding sin. God has X-ray vision and tends to see through whatever we are hiding behind, taking in the condition of our hearts. The funny thing is, while we know that Adam and Eve got caught, we supergirls think we can hide better. After all, they were pretty lame with their fig leaves. It is a time-honored tradition among tired supergirls to do something wrong . . . hide it . . . pretend it’s not there . . . and hope that God doesn’t call us out from the bushes exposing us for who we are . . . sinners.

Duck and cover is the brilliant plan of the In-sin-erator. He wants to keep us on the run and in hiding. He knows that as long as there is sin in our hearts, we are separated from God. Of course, he doesn’t put it to us this way because none of us wants to be separated from God. So he says things like, “Don’t worry. What you did isn’t a big deal. If you talk about it now, it will just mess everything up. Just bury it and move on.”

Or, “Hey, who says that it’s sin anyway? It’s a personal choice. You did it to better yourself. Who can argue with that?”

He often recruits Mrs. Prideful to help him out. She likes to remind you, “You don’t want to humiliate yourself, do you? Whatever you do, just don’t tell anyone what you did. They’ll judge you. Think less of you. And they will tell other people about your sin.”

The problem with the In-sin-erator’s “bury it and move on” plan is that we can’t. Once we have buried it, we are stuck in the clutches of whatever it is that we have done. Instead of admitting we made a mistake, we give this mistake the power to keep us hiding and separated from God. If we can’t admit to what we have done, we become a slave to it. To the power of the sin. To the fear that we will be found out. To the knowledge that we are imperfect. It’s dark and it’s ugly, girls, I’m not going to lie. The In-sin-erator wants to keep us in the dark, but Jesus has a different idea.

The apostle John talks about it this way.

This is the message he has given us to announce to you: God is light and there is no darkness in him at all. So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness. We are not living in the truth. But if we are living in the light of God’s presence, just as Christ is, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from every sin.

If we say we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and refusing to accept the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong. If we claim we have not sinned, we are calling God a liar and showing that his word has no place in our hearts.

1 John 1:5–10

As we tired supergirls are trying to unravel the mysteries of our hearts and all the issues that plague us, we must have a long, soulful chat about sin. Let’s call it what it is. We might as well shout it from the mountaintops.
We have a lot of sin
in us!
Because there is no moving forward, no getting free, until we admit that. Also, I may be stupid and stubborn in some areas of my life, but I am smart enough to know that I do not want to be the person who calls God a liar. I want his words to have a place in my heart. I don’t want to be a fool; I want to be cleansed and forgiven. It seems that walking in the light with Jesus hinges on my ability to admit my sinfulness. He can’t make me righteous until I admit that I am wrong.

Living in a culture that thrives on being in the right, we find it difficult to admit that we have been wrong. Living in a world in which each person claims to have his or her own personal truth and set of guidelines, we find it difficult to draw a bead on sin. Living in a society that thrives on darkness and celebrates depravity, we find it difficult to know how to step into the light. But if in the depths of our tired supergirl hearts, we want to walk in God’s presence and taste the freedom he has to offer us, we have to quit hiding.

Zacchaeus realizes this while perching in a tree. His sin is hidden from no one but himself. In fact, as a tax collector, he is despised by most. He has swindled his countrymen in the past, has taken their cash, and is living off of the hardearned, much-needed money of others. Zacchaeus is a mess. He is rich, but he is a mess. He isn’t happy and he isn’t free. Because if he was, he wouldn’t keep needing to take more money or look for something or someone who meant more. He wouldn’t be shimmying up a tree, surrounded by foliage (here we go with the foliage again), searching for answers.

Even though Zacchaeus is on the lookout for Jesus, he is still hiding. He wants to catch a glimpse of the Messiah, to see what all the fuss is about, without giving up his day job. I know he is a small man, but if he really wanted to see Jesus close up, he could have pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Zacchaeus isn’t just short; he feels small inside. As far as sinning goes, he is a repeat offender, and everybody knows it. The weight of all he has done to his fellow men, the stealing, the lying, the conning, using his authority for evil, keeps him in hiding. So here he is, high from his leafy vantage point, trying to catch a glimpse of God, while not yet fully coming into the light. But Jesus doesn’t play like that.

The crowd swells and pushes forward, massing around Jesus, moving him forward under the canopy of trees. Jesus stops and looks up and sees Zacchaeus peering at him between the branches.

When Jesus came by, he looked up at Zacchaeus and called him by name. “Zacchaeus!” he said. “Quick, come down! For I must be a guest in your home today.”

Zacchaeus quickly climbed down and took Jesus to his house in great excitement and joy. But the crowds were displeased. “He has gone to be the guest of a notorious sinner,” they grumbled.

Luke 19:5–7

(The funny part of this Scripture is the crowd saying he is going to the house of a sinner when in fact any house he chose to go to would be a sinner’s house. The other people just manage to keep their sin on the down low.)

Meanwhile, Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “I will give half my wealth to the poor, Lord, and if I have overcharged people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much!”

Jesus responded, “Salvation has come to this home today, for this man has shown himself to be a son of Abraham. And I, the Son of Man, have come to seek and save those like him who are lost.”

Luke 19:8–10

This is the truly beautiful part of the story. Jesus comes to seek and save the lost. He is looking for sinners. Just like God comes looking for Adam and Eve in the garden. He is looking for people stuck knee deep in wrongdoing. He is looking for tired supergirls who miss the mark on a spectacularly regular basis. He knows there is this darkness, this chasm of sin that separates us from our Creator, from our destiny. And he is the only one who can set it straight. He is on the lookout for people he can bring into the light.

Zacchaeus is excited. In all his wrongness, Jesus seeks him out and wants to hang out with him. That sets Zacchaeus free. Jesus doesn’t have to point out his sin. Zacchaeus offers instead, “Look, I’ve done bad stuff, and I am going to set it right.”

All along he has been sinning, he knows that. Why the sudden change of tune? Because of that crazy, mind-boggling love God has for him. He can’t withstand all that good solid love. It does him in.

Romans 5:8 says, “But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”

When you are a mess and you know you are a mess and everyone else knows you are a mess and then God comes along and says, “I love you even when you are a mess,” you are undone.

You can’t stand to be separated any longer. We tired supergirls are no different. We try to hide who we really are, but God is calling us down from trees and out from behind juniper bushes. He is tracking us down in the midst of our sin and saying, “I want to go to your house. I want to hang out with you. I love you.”

And we cave. Who can resist that kind of loving? God’s brilliant-shining-I-love-you-in-spite-of-your-junk-kind-oflove.

A note to the repeat offender: it doesn’t matter if it is the twenty-seventh time you have had to bring this particular thing into the light. Bring it on out again. It loses its power when it’s in the light. It doesn’t matter if your sin is small and petty or so big you feel it will crush you, get it out in the light. If you are not sure how, try Zacchaeus’s method. Name it and claim it. Tell Jesus you did wrong stuff and you aren’t going to anymore. And then grab a few of your favorite supergirls, who love you like crazy, and tell them the same. They will understand because the funny thing is that they have a lot of sin too. And as for the In-sin-erator, you can tell him to keep his game of hide-and-seek to himself because you’ve been found. By Jesus. And it just doesn’t get any better than that.