Self-Redemption

One last post about "Sin, Pride, and Self-Acceptance" and then I'm done, I promise.

So one of the premises of the book is that as we struggle with self-acceptance, we create an idealized self. This self is an impossible, super-sized version of ourselves. Of course, we can't live up to this--or only in the rarest moments. So we are alternately full of ourselves and hard on ourselves, depending on our performance that day.

What strikes me about this notion of the idealized self is this deep, hard-wired desire that all of us have to have a new name. We long to be something more than we are. We want a new name and so we create one for ourselves.

What the Lord offers us is a new name. Our true name, the real us. But rather than accept that offer, we prefer to try to work it out on our own, to establish our own name on our own terms for our own sake. We are attempting to redeem ourselves rather than accept the gift of redemption being offered to us from the outside.

This, I suspect, is the cause of most of the misery in our world.