After a seven-month break from the bike, I showed up a week ago to a spin class at LA Fitness, the gym here in Atlanta that The Husband and I just joined.  I waved to our realtor, who was setting up her own bike across the room.  Then I pondered the dilemma that confronted me as I stared at the contraption before me, one that in no way resembled the bikes I used to ride at New York Sports Club.  The new bike whose controls are unfamiliar, whose water-bottle-holder is in a different location, whose square footage of space is surrounded by strangers.  My dilemma, one I have faced throughout life, was this: Do I ask for help?

Throughout my early years, I flew quietly under all radars and tried never to rock any boats.  All of that hiding came to a head and a crashing halt when I up and moved across the country to the loudest, most radar-blasting and boat-rocking city of them all.  And the extremes I had spent my life up to that point wavering between–silent meekness and angry explosions–began to be sanded down and evened out by this city that could both inflate my identity and deal me an ass-kicking any day of the week.  And by the God who could do the same, but chose instead to operate within the realms of love and grace to accomplish his purposes.  (Though often, love and grace felt more like ass-kickings than getting lost in the subway did.)

And the thing that I know I will never get away from this side of heaven, the sin that so easily trips me up and entangles because it is a part of our human condition and one that is often praised and placed on pedestals by the names of Ambition and Drivenness and Hard Work, is this: my constant pursuit to prove myself, to establish myself in any name but his, to “here I go again on my own” or “I did it my way” in the traditions of Whitesnake and Sinatra.

Which is why, even though I capitulated to that growth in grace enough to ask for the spin instructor’s help, my immediate inner response to her question–“Have you done this before?”–was, “Not only have I done this before, but I’ve done it for years in gyms across Manhattan and on Park Avenue that I walked to from my New York apartment in the snow uphill both ways past celebrities and financiers and instructed by a tiny gay Asian man with an earring who could school you and if I can make it there I can make it anywhere especially this wannabe gym and your amateur class.”

Of course, I didn’t say that.  Out loud.

What I said was, “Yes.”

But my inner monologue revealed to me once again, as ever, how desperate I am to be an expert.  At anything. At everything.  How much of my activity is dedicated to flashing my credentials, how much of my working and running and cleaning is motivated by that ugly buried desire to have people look at me in a certain way.  An impressed way.

How everything I believe in tells me that all that stuff is filthy rags compared to what has been done on my behalf, that records broken or unmet or, well, records at all just don’t matter.  Which is why, when I show up at 10 am on Sunday morning carrying my baggage of deeds good and bad, my ugly thoughts and my judgments, I remember that there is no room for them here.  I am not meeting Santa Claus and his naughty-or-nice lists.  I am not meeting someone who is interested in lists at all, which at first is a disappointment because I’m so good at making lists! but then is a relief because I’m not always so good at sticking to them.  And all the preening and strutting I’ve perfected throughout the years will not get me to, or keep me from, his lap.  The one place where I can be exactly what I am and loved at the same time.  Grades and accomplishments and successes and failures notwithstanding, because when he looks at me and is impressed, it’s not because of anything I’ve done.

Yesterday I spoke to a troop of Girl Scouts and when I was introduced as a dentist, one of them asked, “Are you rich?”  I wanted to tell her a lot of things: hell no; that right now, nobody is; that “rich” is not about money; instead I just laughed.  Because we human beings are all about measuring things.  And God is so not.