Last night when my husband turned out the lights, i wasn't sleepy.  I sat in our wonderful green leather easy chair reading Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved.  The chapter titled "Broken" called me. I was feeling how small, stupid and foolish I am, forever prone to repeating mistakes. The impetus? Letting someone cheat me out of $45. I could have prevented it, if only I was thinking. 

I was holding my miniature pooble and standing in front of a Starbucks cashier when I had to fish money out of my backpack. Thinking it was a five dollar bill, I handed her the cash. I saw a strange look in her her eyes when I called the bill a five, but I thought it had to do with my poodle. I saw that peculiar look in her eyes five minutes later when she brought my tea to me as I sat at an outdoor table. I didn't know why she looked unsettled until last night. I checked my purse and found that I no longer had the $50 bill that I had before.

To make it worse, I had made the same error the day previous and the clerk then was honest. If only I had remembered that a fifty can easily be mistaken for a five.

And then there's the pain of realizing how needy I still am, how prone I am to over-react and mis-interpret according to my own insecurities.  To point, since I wrote my last post, I chatted briefly with my sister-in-law about that painful situation. I learned that though she sat at the same table with me, the words had not caused her pain. She affirmed that her family wants values me as did my mother-in-law in her e-mail to me yesterday.  Good words, but then opened room for me to fault myself for feeling so strongly in the first place. I am needy. I am broken. I am insecure.

Here's where Nouwen's words are helping me. He urges us to embrace our brokenness. He writes, "The first step to healing is not a step away from the pain but a step toward it" (95). The realization of our brokennes is wrenching because we often see pain as confirmation of our negative feelings about ourselves. We things gone awry as indicative that our deepest fears about ourselves are true.

I love Nouwen's words about this. "There is always something in us searching for an explanation of what takes place in our lives and, if we have already yielded to the temptation of self-rejection, then every form of misfortune only deepens it" (97).

I am choosing today to throw away the lie that I am a bad person because I make mistakes or am insecure and need affirmation. I choose today to believe that I am God's beloved and to see my weakness not as confirmation that I am worthless, but as an opportunity to rely on God and to purge away the lie that my worth comes from my perfect record of action or belief.

I forget what I should know and I get upset at small things sometimes, but God still dearly loves me and calls me his child.