The Wretched

In finding ourselves fitted for the service of Our Lord there is the most ecclesiastical of epiphanies, a churchly charge rooted in the simple joy of usefulness and purpose. There is a wonderful filling up of the soul with a fresh gust of the Divine. Hope! Beauty! Love! Yet in this same present vessel there lurks also the untamed beast of Self, hungry and stalking to devour any morsel of that spirit. He savors any juicy taste of the Yielded. He waits in the shadows with a steely silence, anticipating the next lowering of the guard, that quiet surrender or sigh or longing. It's a cloaked mutiny, treason of the Most High, yet played out in the private chambers of the heart. This is what drives him. This is where he finds his growl, there in the choked throat of the struggling saint, in knees so deeply mired. This is the bane of his existence, to calculate and pounce, to fill his belly and lick his loins for yet one more day of wretchedness.

And for this, this wretch, Jesus did not run away.

This King knew every treachery, every double-cross, every broken promise, every coup d'état, and yet no one took His life. Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself so that a table might be spread, that there might be a feast in your honor, and all this while you were yet a wretch. We are all yet wretches this side of Heaven, and there is none that are righteous. No, not one. It's not that any one man has risen to the Esteemed and is now deemed holy to teach the rest of the Wallowers. The very stink of wretchedness and a man's realization of his own wretched self yet embraced by the Splendid, this is what forms him, fitted and ready, for the service to The Lord. He knows what he is rescued from, and he knows it's himself.