When I was being cut on (Hey, am I self-referential or what?) they let me wakeup enough to watch them close the incision on my left foot. I said to myself and to God, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Believe me, I am NOT proud of my feet! But even my poor flat wide pancakes are "wonderful".
On rare occasions I "do something right", say, preach a non-sick-making sermon. It would be just as foolish of me to deny that it was a good sermon and to be grateful for it and analyze what made it good, what could have made it better, etc. as it would to credit myself for it, to say MY rhetorical right hand, My vast and deep spearchool wisdom, made this sermon.
I'm serious about saying "All is gift," as serious as a heart-attack. I look at my goofiness, and how sometimes it has, say, defused what was becoming an ugly confrontation, or my persistence, and how it means that in my late fifties I've acquired skills I'd alway kind of thought it would be nice to have but never thought I'd actually have ... and I think they're neat!
I sure as shooting can't take any credit for them. That would be flat absurd, and besides God reliably stomps that kind of stuff out of me very promptly.
But I do Him no honor and show no gratitude if I do not appreciate the goodness of what He has given me.
The small trailing arbutus hidden in the shady woods sings, "Glory to God, I am fearfully and wonderfully made!'" One of the gifts I look for is to be increasingly "detached" from the deceitful sense of ownership so that I can prasie God for every gift I see, in myself or in a "rival". I bless God that, though when I preached I was accounted by many to be not so bad, I have finally met a stable of Dominicans who if it ever came to a preaching smack-down would leave me no more than a spot of grease on the floor. "This is the Lord's doing, and it is sho' 'nuff something marvellous in my eyes."
And now I am really going to collapse. Back in a couple of hours.
No, the way we are is not the way God made us. Otherwise, Christ would have come for no reason whatsoever. We are a poor apporximation at best what God made us. A fallen, tarnished figure of a once glorious creation.
Back in the '70s the new wave of 'improving self-image' through self-congratulatory folly came into vogue (and persists to this day). I remember a cartoon in one of the newspapers that said "God don't make no junk." God doesn't. WE do.
WELL PUT.
Thx.
Happy healing feet to you.