Losing Myself

And the angel of the LORD appeared to him and said to him, “The LORD is with you, O mighty man of valor.” Judges 6:12

I grew up knowing that Christians didn’t drink or smoke and that those who did were bound for hell. I developed this idea that being a Christian meant forgoing all earthly pleasures so that I could one day go to heaven. I saw the Christian life as a form of asceticism (though I didn’t know what that word meant) where I simply had to endure the drudgery of this life to enjoy the afterlife. Being a Christian – in my mind – meant sacrificing who I wanted to be so that I could become the bland, vanilla image that I had of Christians. I wanted to make my own decisions though and so, I feared that following God meant losing myself, conforming to a gray, boring life. When I realized that God would forgive me for any sin, I decided that I could do whatever I wanted, enjoy this life, be forgiven, and then go to heaven in the end. It was a win-win scenario.

So, I did what I wanted . . . and it made me miserable, destroying my life. In recovery, I’ve found that following God doesn’t make me like everyone else. Rather, following God makes me who I was meant to be, which is anything but boring. Only in following God have I found the joy and peace that I thought I could find in my pursuit of self.

God sees who we can become. This is the lesson of today’s passage. In the story, God chose a man named Gideon to deliver the Israelites from oppression. When God’s angel visited Gideon, he addressed him as a mighty man of valor. Gideon was the humble son of a poor farming family. He was no warrior. God, however, saw not what Gideon was, but what he could become. Gideon had his doubts about following God – How can I save Israel? Behold, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house (Judges 6:15). God though, knew who Gideon could be.

I once dreaded the boring Christian life, wanting rather to go my own way. In doing so, I found that my way got my name in the paper for a drug addiction. In that misery, I decided that following God may not be so bad after all. It was only in following God’s way that I’ve begun to become who he made me to be. Did I lose myself? The only thing I sacrificed was the misery of my way. In following God, I’ve begun to become the best and truest version of myself – the person God made me to be. And that is anything but boring.