Layers

I just recently realized something that had changed me. Something that has been both crippling and freeing. I am not a good person. Yes, yes, I've always known I'm a sinner and that no one is perfect, but I think down in my soul I have truly gotten this far believing that I am basically good, aside from one or two issues. Over the past months, my glaring flaws have become more apparent placed before my continual necessity for energy and perseverance within my senior year. I've been tired, which means I've been irritable, which means I've been angry, obnoxious, prideful, cruel and apathetic. These things, and many, many others, have been presented before me. They have intimidated me, mocked me, scared me. I don't like the person I see when my veneer of energy and optimism is torn back. Lipstick on a pig I suppose. It has worried me to think that my friends at school have seen some version of me that they now know is the real me. The man underneath the layers. And why should they like him any more than I do? Luckily, this hasn't been all fear inducing. God has used others and His word to encourage me. It's at these low points when God's grace seems so much bigger. My failure is just as filthy as my goodness before the gigantic tower of forgiveness that my God has offered. It's in this knowledge that God makes Himself even greater. While we love the versions of ourselves we project on our inner spheres, God doesn't love those falsehoods. He loves the dirty, broken people underneath. He wants to take those sinners and convert them to the image of His Som, into Saints. So instead of a shiny sinner, I can be confident in being an under-construction saint. Laid bare before my God and my peers, I am ready to honestly change myself, not my layers.