My favorite book, Unless by Carol Sheilds, talks about "goodness". Wondering what it is, what makes a person good, if anyone truly can be good. Throughout the book a mother is trying to figure out why her daughter left school, broke up with her boyfriend, and began to live in a shelter in downtown Toronto begging for pennies on the street corner at Bathurst and Bloor. While I won't give away the conclusion, this young woman was herself struggling with that question, wondering if there was any goodness left in the world, and ironically, it was a traumatic event, in which she played the heroine which proved that she, herself, possessed a modicum of that elusive quality.
Do I have any true motive? Any pure motive for goodness? Most of what I do is driven by a need to be valued, by a need to matter, to be loved. While healing through a program called Freedom Session has lifted the burden of much of these needs off of my shoulders, still I fight the demon of people-pleasing, of doing anything I can not to be rejected, not to be thought ill of, the demon of fighting against perceived-failure.
Let me rest in the goodness of you, God. Let me rest in the knowledge that your goodness allows you to love me even when I screw up, even when I'm not good enough, even when I fail... and most of all when I am not truthful, hiding my genuine being from others, because of my fear of perceived-failure.
Why is that young woman at Bathurst and Bloor? A failure to recognize that the only true goodness belongs to God... and that only a deep connection to him will allow us to fully let goodness dwell within our hearts.
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