Idol exposure is some painful business for the recipients of its chisel.

Time and again I am reminded of what a failure I am as a human being.  Anger, self-righteousness, grimy iPhone screen. I can’t escape it.  And time and again, I attempt to–to prove my worth, polish my image, look to have it all together.

Only grace can save me from both my failure and my constant efforts to avoid it.

Running as been a barometer for my life since I took it up fifteen years ago.  I wasn’t good at it, so I quietly sought to conquer it.  I grabbed the dog, poor low-riding basset hound, and jogged down the street past the cute guy’s house.  I attacked the circle around my college campus, pounding the pavement solo or with girlfriends as last night’s beer and pizza spun around our stomachs.  I stretched beside the Central Park Reservoir and put foot to gravel.  But the starting and finishing lines began long before I took up this sadistic hobby.  When I look back, I know that all my life has been spent running.  Though I imagined myself headed towards a goal, I was actually running away from everything I feared: low self-worth, unpolished image, appearing to not have it all together.  If I could conquer this thing (school, career, love life), I would be okay.  Except the ticking off of the items on the list didn’t bring peace, and the unaccomplished items carried devastation.  Nothing was ever enough.

And yet everything mattered too much.

Last week, I was reminded that I will never be immune to idol-building, this side of eternity at least.  A series of shitty runs left me feeling like a novice, and I realized that the thing I was afraid of this time has always haunted me.  Followed me around from location to location, from Montgomery to Birmingham to New York to Atlanta.  Followed me, me, grown-up me, with the husband and the house and the diplomas and the sparkling floors and iPhone screen.  Followed me to mile two and left me gasping for air, that singular fear:

I am a sham.

And everyone will soon know it.

This is literally what came to my mind as I walked home feeling the big L etched into my forehead, walked home like a girl. I was afraid of exposure.  And I don’t even post my runs on Facebook!  And then the universality, the insidiousness of it all, hit me: there is nothing that this world, that I, won’t ruin.  The floors will attract crumbs like a magnet and the bathroom that was sparkling yesterday is speckled with water stains hours later.  The smile of a child gives way to the cynicism of an adult.  The heart wears down and stops beating.

There is only one whom decay dared not touch, not after three days in a dank and dark tomb; not after forty days of fasting and taunting.  Evil will ultimately succumb to one alone, and it is not me.

My lifelong efforts to be someone I wasn’t had to fall apart sometime.  This is the way of the world, fault lines and fissures.  Only one can never be what he isn’t.

When I finally let it go, this pressure to be perfect, to run the farthest, that’s when the truth broke through.  And I saw that what I had always secretly believed to be God’s bullying–bolstered by an ignorant yet world-sanctioned misreading of that Book, especially the part with Job–was anything but.  He was never the mean kid on the playground who stole my lunch money for laughs.  Those things I felt were taken from me were never mine–they only kept me from him.  And he didn’t take them, because here’s the thing:

Nothing in this world was ever meant to bear my full weight.

Nothing–not marriage, career, children, legs. Because everything of this world, even the world itself, was (intelligently) designed to send me to him, not take his place.  And every last one of those good things will crumble and die under the pressure of my expectations and need.  My bottomless, ever-present need.

He is not taking away anything but the mask.  He is in the business of revealing. And as everything else in this world follows the timer of its own demise, only he remains as he started, never to change.  This is what I was made from, what I will return to.  The only thing that holds up.