“Imperfection is the wound that lets God in”

There is a special kind of grace that gets bestowed on those that can recognize their faults and weaknesses and sincerely seek out help and forgiveness to atone for them. It seems like people in the modern age don’t have clearly defined ideas of what is right and wrong  and they are missing a moral compass that would help them recognize their flaws. Bob Dylan diagnosed this malady succinctly in the song lyric “they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong” .

The danger of individuals deciding for themselves what is right and wrong is that it can lead to spiritual blindness and arrogance in people who start believing they can do whatever they want – losing sight of the sins in their life that prevent them from repairing their broken relationships with God, others, and themselves.

Jesus tells this parable about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Chapter 18 of the Gospel of Luke:

“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

CS Lewis once wrote that Christianity has nothing to say to those who do not feel like they need saving. We are all human and we all have faults that we live with as Leonard Cohen reminds us in his song lyric “Forget your perfect offering – there is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in“.

History is full of stories of flawed people that turned their lives around because they recognized the imperfections in their lives and asked for supernatural spiritual assistance to lead them out of the darkness. They turned to a higher power because they felt they could not do it on their own.

My experiences interacting with incarcerated men during my prison ministry volunteer activities have convinced me that God works with the crooked timber of human failure – it is a shame that many of us only come to accept God when we are at the lowest point in our lives. Many of the incarcerated are addicts and their addictions controlled their life and blinded them to their crimes. But one positive outcome of their incarceration is that they have time to re-examine their life and their actions and they become more receptive to the Gospel message of hope and reconciliation.

Sitting in the prison cafeteria, I noticed these 12 Steps – originally created for the Alcoholics Anonymous program – painted on the cafeteria wall:

Alcoholic Anonymous Step 11

1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Even though Alcoholics Anonymous is not designed to be a religious or spiritual program, I was struck with how many of the steps to success involved turning your life over to a higher power and recognizing that we are powerless to overcome defects of character on our own.

I believe the 12 steps capture the ingredients expressed by most religions and that are most necessary to leading a fulfilling life; namely, don’t make yourself  God, practice humility and admit our imperfections, recognize a higher power and seek him out, make amends to those we have hurt, empty yourself of earthly attachments and do what you can to help others in need.