My white knight

Just finished reading the chapter "tassels" in the book "velvet elvis" by rob bell. It's a really fantastic chapter! It really showed me something. My white knight. Now, I may have mentioned this guy in passing to some of you, but I really do think about this concept a lot. A White knight.
Uncorrubtable. Unstoppable. Un-whatever-able. The knight in shining armor. The guy you can count on. The guy you can trust. With anything. Ever. Because he'll never let you down.

This idea first wandered into my head.... Well, I'd really love to say "after watching 'The Dark Knight'", but that's not strictly true. And this idea stuck with me. The good guy. The one that everyone looks up to and admires and wants to be like. The example. And after teenstreet, this idea flourished in my mind. The White Knight. Me! I could do it with God's help after all. I would do it with God's help. I'd be honest and true all the time, and people would be inspired by me to greater and greater acts of kindness and love. But after reading that chapter, where he talks about his "superpastor", this magnificent hero of a man that never stops and never tires, but that's the thing. This guy and Rob Bell were two different people. 

While I tried to live as my own personal "White knight", things didn't really turn out so well.
You see, what I forgot, was that I am a sinner. That might sound like a simple word, but for me it really, really, REALLY isn't. That meant that I was living the life of a sinner. A redeemed sinner trying his best, perhaps, but I always came up short. Always. In everything I did. But I couldn't come up short! I was a white knight! I had to do the right thing. To screw up would meant that I wasn't. And I had to be. How else could I change things in my life, in the world? I had to be doing the right thing. So I decided that I was. I had to. I had to know the right answers. I had to say that right things. All the time.

Now, what's interesting to note here is, I had to do those things. I had to be those things. That doesn't mean that I could. See, what I've realised, is that I'm not a white knight. I'm Lorcan. Lorcan gets scared. Lorcan can't sing very well. Lorcan struggles with pornography and lust. Lorcan has all sorts of crazy scars and problems. And Lorcan doesn't know anything as he should know it yet. Anything. Ask me any sort of question, my answer will not be perfect. But I ignored that. I get things wrong. All the time. A white knight would get them right. All the time. I had this sort of vision that if I started living like this idea, this image, that somehow people would look up to me, to blah blah blah. Look up to me? I am the last person anyone should be looking up to.

But after I spent 20 minutes furiously writing down everything that this idea was, and I wasn't, I came to a conclusion. I am Lorcan. I will always be Lorcan.  No matter what I do or where I go, I will always be me. And then I remembered something else. The very thing that drew me to God in the first place. He loves me. Now, I, and likely you, have heard this fifty thousand times. But today, it meant something different. He loves me. Not who I could be, who I will be, or who I am, but me. Past, Future, and even present are irrelevant. Yes, even the present. These words I'm typing now aren't good enough to be deserving of love. But he does. Me. I realized something else. I am really, really messed up. I wanted to use another word instead of messed there, to perhaps illustrate my inadequacy, but I figure I can just tell you, and you'll take my word for it. 

Complicated, maybe that's a better way of putting it. Not complex like a watch, no. Complex like a knot that's old and worn and all tied up and jumbled and confused. I don't understand most anything I do. I don't understand why I do most anything I do. But now instead of whitewashing my pain and inadequacy, sucking it up, and saying "I can't afford to break", I'm trying to be honest with myself. And that's tricky. But It's also very freeing. Because now, even when I get it wrong, that's ok. Because I'm not hiding my sin from God, I'm showing it to him. Showing him how broken and knotted I am, and saying: "I do not understand". And I don't.