My Truth for Today: A Cancel Confession
I want you to like me. I want you to love me. I want you to accept me. I want you to think I am handsome and brilliant and special and cool and successful. I want you to see me as your source of help. Your problem solver. Your best option. I want you to agree with everything I think because you see me as some kind of wise oracle. I want you to subscribe to me and never cancel me. I want you to buy in to the version of excellence I am selling. And if you don’t, I want to figure out how to better market myself to you so I can convince you that I truly am all that you need. I want to put you in my sales funnel and have you land in my lifetime me-customer pile. And if I can’t get you to the bottom of the “me” funnel, I hope to at least get you down the pipe a bit. I would settle for you thinking that I am just decent looking, not stupid and kinda cool. Get your occasional glance or your occasional like, even if it is on something as empty as social media. (I am a rejection-phobe and a people-pleasing “compliment-beggar.”)
But…
What I want is not okay.
On so many levels it is not okay. It’s primarily not okay because I’m not supposed to look to you for acceptance or validation. You are not God and I am not God. I will change day to day. I will fail you. I will disappoint you. And you will do that to me as well. And that’s ok because we are humans and we specialize in failure, unfaithfulness, and stupidity. I don’t blame you for not loving me or for not liking me or for not trusting me and even for not agreeing with me. I’m not that handsome or successful or cool or smart. I’m just me. And you are just you and that means there is no pressure to be good looking or impressive or successful or amazing in any way. And you don’t have to market yourself to me. I will stop marketing to you. I will instead drop my guard and blow up my funnels and stop trying so damn hard to convince any of you that I am anything more than what you see when you meet me. I hope that when we do meet I am able to help you in some way. That you walk away feeling loved and valued. But I don’t expect that and I won’t expect you to expect that either.
If you do think I am a genius and you want to subscribe to my channel, do it only as long as you remember that I will never be able to satisfy your deepest needs. Only God can do that. And if you do subscribe to me, know that I will never give you binge-worthy content like Netflix does. I’m not Queens Gambit. I’m no Lupin or Bridgerton (thank the Lord).
I am just a speck with limited experiences, huge entitlements, cultural limitations, a flawed perspective, and unjustifiable biases and blind spots.
I am a flesh and blood sinner who is going to die like you will. But I am also a loved child of God who will never be canceled by the One who shovels out grace by the truckload onto my existence. And that’s what makes me keep walking on in joy and doing my best while I still breathe. (If you don’t have that God subscription yet, I recommend you get it and never cancel it. It guarantees you meetings with the only truly impressive being in the universe. And He will always pull off the good, pleasing and perfect when we are busy pulling off the opposites.)
This is the end of my rant and my confession and also hopefully of my lifetime of self promotion. But don’t be surprised if you see me trying to start selling the “Me-pillow” again. I am slow to learn. I haven’t quite nailed the whole correct view of humanity like Jesus did when He refused to give Himself to people, because He knew what was in us. But I’ll keep trying.
In the meantime, I will leave it here with this: if you are of the opinion that I am a goofy, disappointing idiot, you are probably at least partially right. If you are of the opinion that I am the coolest, deepest and nicest person in your sphere of influence, you probably need to expand that sphere a bit, but again you are probably partially right.
It probably depends on what season of life you met me in. I’ve been very ugly in some and quite beautiful in others…
Here’s to better. For all of us.
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