It’s not easy being me, and I’ve not always been very good at it. Obviously, having made it halfway through a century of living this particular life, I’ve not done much to embrace success, largely because I feel like I’ve made failure my goal. In that respect, being me has been a piece of cake and a rousing acheievement.
I’ve reveled in failure. Inasmuch as the Universe has conspired to bring me opportunity after opportunity along the journey up to Now, I’ve watched each one show me grand possibilities and numbly allowed them to pass me by as I’ve sat along the pathway, too afraid to embrace my potential. I’ve toyed with it and sketched out blueprints of my future by allowing creativity to guide my imagination, but I’ve never done much to actually bring my blueprints off of the page.
For as many talents as I’ve pursued and as many gifts as I have been given, it’s been a rare thing to truly invest in what I am or could become. I’ve often identified as the sinner the Church told me that I was, separating myself from the Kingdom that is my birthright in order to embrace a poverty of spirit that has often left me destitute and helpless as I’ve watched life unfold around me. And sometimes I’ve identified as the Watcher, joyfully experiencing the glee of Steve’s adventurous debauchery and reveling in the opportunity to enjoy being nothing.
And sometimes, I’ve identified as my own warped version of Christ, sacrificing what I could be as a man by taking the “sins” of humankind onto my shoulders and doing everything in my power to deserve the eternal torment that the Church said I had coming to me. It has often been a twisted goal of mine to let down every person that ever had the inclination to have faith in me. Somewhere in my rationale, I figured that if people could forgive me and allow me to actually follow through in rising to my potential, they may be able to extend the power of forgiveness to others in this world of ours, which is so laden with addictions and dissapointments.
Unfortunately, I’ve not had much success with getting myself off of the cross, much less rising from the dead. While the metaphor of Christianity still seems etched in my brain, I’ve been even less willing to identify as Christ than I have with identifying as a Christian. Submerging myself into my role as a sinner, I have found little forgiveness from those I have wronged, largely because I’ve done little to forgive myself.
Instead of rising to my potential as the creator of my life, I’ve replayed my scenario as a sinner by merely rehashing the same moments of impotence over and over again, never fully realizing what I am capable of. In many of those moments, I have considered the possibility of my life emulating the heroes I was introduced to in the Church. For all of the men who stood up at the pulpit with their stories of how Jesus had turned their lives from aimless sojourns of sinfulness into transformed followers of Christ, I created a template that I followed in fabricating my life of depravity but have never found that moment of transmogrification when Christ would turn my life around.
Granted, even with those who gave Jesus all of the credit for transforming them as the Bible told them to, they still had to do the heavy lifting of changing their habits and mending their ways. But since losing faith in the Church, I’ve also lost faith in its prescription for change. I wasn’t asking Jesus to change my heart any more than I’d done it so many times as a young innocent who had been constantly reassured that I was indeed a natural born sinner, and I’ve done little to change my ways either.
Although this journey through life has granted me with so much to give, I have relegated myself to becoming a has been before I ever was. As a writer, filmmaker, musician, businessman, lover, poet, and world changer, I’ve often invested as little energy as possible, regularly doing just enough to reach the precipice before letting my endeavors roll back over me and plummet into the abyss as I embraced my role as a failure.
I’d like to say that today is the day that Jesus changes my life and I’ll be able to look back on 1/23/23 as the day I left my sinful ways and started the path to righteousness. But chances are good that it will just be another day. However, it can be a day of reckoning and opening to my role as the creator that I truly am. Although Jesus may not take my sins away, I can open up to more than what I have allowed myself to be.