For more than 40 years there was the Mighty Me, fighting and hiding and strutting and conniving its way toward a ‘life story’ it was told to love and taught to hate. And with each passing year the separation grew larger, the burden greater, the light dimmer.
Eventually, the suffering became too much, and down down down to its knees went the Mighty Me. Tears, snot, pleading, begging, ‘Help me, I can’t do it anymore, please.’
And at last, the words, ‘I surrender.’
Followed, almost immediately, by a smaller voice, a wiser voice, a non-Mighty Me voice: ‘No, you don’t.’
The Truth of that voice was undeniable, and the Mighty Me knew it had not surrendered. Not entirely.
But the act had begun, the evidence was there, the surrendering entity on its knees, it was doing the best that it could.
The minutes ticked by. The Mighty Me continued to kneel, waiting for an exchange with God. ‘My surrender for….? What do you have, God?’
It’s understandable. After all, this is how life is lived. Tit for tat, give and get.
God, it seemed, didn’t exist that way. And so there was nothing but the sound of the Mighty Me’s breath and attempts to wipe away a face covered in liquid confession.
No response.
The mind searched, waited, wondered, hoped.
Nothing.
Something is Listening
Eventually the Mighty Me clambered to its feet, dragged itself to a chair. Deadened, emptied, what now, what next, what’s the point?
And then (this is the important part), its eyes settled on a nondescript volume tucked almost out of sight in an overcrowded bookshelf. As if on auto-control, the Mighty Me leaned forward, fished the volume from the shelf.
Ah yes, an old journal. There had been so many over the years, filled with endless ruminations about the Mighty Me’s confused and chaotic life, its plans for the future, its regrets of the past, its fears of the present.
The Mighty Me had forgotten about this one and its contents. It opened the journal to its first page, and there, in black and white, in the Mighty Me’s own handwriting, a decade-old admission to a repeat performance of the very same behavior it had only recently suffered through. It was as if the Mighty Me was an actor playing the same terrible, self-destructive part, hellbent on living it again and again. And it was only made obvious now, thanks to 10 years of hindsight contained in that forgotten journal.
Despite its crushing despair and exhaustion, something arose within the Mighty Me. What, exactly? Not happiness. Certainly not joy. But a recognition that something – God? – had in fact been listening, had sent it in there to read those pages, to see for itself.
Who best to illustrate the point than the Mighty Me itself, in its own words. This was some brilliant lesson-planning. This was God-brilliant.
It would be many, many years before that day’s initial, incomplete surrender was seen for the starting point that it was; that the spiritual journey began not with the proverbial first step or a bold venture into a vision quest. But on its knees in a state of profound, obsequious humility.
A tattered and shattered Me might still be there, but ‘Mighty’ was at last being pulled from the marquee.