Day Seven

Day Seven // February 24 // Whatever is Right

“Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.” – William Penn –

Liar. Four brutal letters. Letters that hurt and sting. Letters that unsettle. Letters that hit a little too close to home… because, ironically, they are true of each of us. We are liars. Not some of us. Not most of us. All of us. We are liars.

Every day, we fib and fudge. Every day, we hedge – seduced by the alluring whispers of relativism. And for as much as we may try to deny it, I’m not talking about the way we talk. I’m thinking about the way we think. Every day, we lie because we lie to ourselves. Every day, in that subtle, thin-as-breath space between how we see life and how life really is, we go to work. We rearrange thoughts and ideas and memories to fit. Like oversized furniture in a too-small guest room, we angle, and we

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barter with ourselves – trying to get all the pieces to match.

Some of us “lie up”: remembering and thinking only the best of ourselves. And some of us “lie down”: fixated on all that we’ve done wrong. But neither of these are right. We try to tell God who we are, and He says in reply, “You don’t have a clue.” It is this transformed way of thinking – asking the Holy Spirit to reveal to us who it is that God knows us to be – that Lent pursues as its object. To think rightly of God, to think rightly of others, and to think rightly of ourselves.

We are not the superstars of our very own dramas. We are not the MVPs or the CEOs the world tempts us to become. Neither are we the losers. We are not the sum total of all our failures. In Christ, they don’t get to define us. No, in truth, we are the very children of God. Think about that. God says that you are worth the price of His Son. Christ died for you – just as you are… not as you think you are.

Like everything, though, it is a choice. It’s a daily desire to hear and to respond to the Truth that sets us free from all the lies. It’s a choice to either accept the meager crown this world affords or to pursue the priceless, unmatchable crown of heaven… for we can’t have both: the crown of thorns and the thirty pieces of silver.