Change

What I'm not saying - and what God is not saying - when we say that you are always made of the same dirt...is that you cannot change. What I'm not saying is that you can't make fundamental changes in how you engage with and experience the world. What I'm not saying is that you are locked into all of the things you don't like about yourself and that God will never set you free from the things that you believe hold you down in life. 

That's not it at all. 

There are three major truths about each and every one of us, and they are these: how you perceive the world, how you perceive yourself, and how you present yourself to the world. 

How you perceive the world, I think, is part of the dirt you're formed of. It's just the way God made you. It's the thing that makes you cry when you see the beauty of a flower or fill up with rage at something broken. It's that instinctual, natural response that you can't help but feel without even thinking about feeling it when you encounter the world. That's your dirt. That's the stuff God made you of, and it's not likely to change very much. You can find ways to mask it, but it's the core of your being - no matter what you do, it's there. 

How you perceive yourself is how you feel about your dirt. It's whether you love or hate or are indifferent to the way God has made you. This is where we have most of our trouble. Most of us, when asked what we want to change in our lives, really want to change the way we feel about things - not our behavior, but our gut-level reaction that produces that behavior - because when we look in the mirror, we feel that. And we know that we feel that. And if it's the kind of thing that, for whatever facade we're trying to create for the world, we don't want to feel, it feels like a betrayal. And if we don't like the behavior that it evokes in us, it feels like the simple solution is to change the way we feel. Most of us, when we're broken, want to change our dirt. We can't. But grace will let us change how we feel about our dirt. We can, in some measure, by grace alone, change how we perceive ourselves, how we think and feel about the way God made us. 

How you present yourself to the world is your actual behavior. It's what comes out of your dirt after you've perceived it. It's what that soul-feeling in your core that you can't do anything about drives you to do. And you can change this. Just because you feel things a certain way doesn't mean you have to act on them in a certain way. 

We don't like this. Nobody likes to be told their behavior is their own choice, but it's true - you decide how you react, even if you don't decide how you feel. And if you want to change something about yourself, if something about how you react in a moment bothers you, it's your behavior - it's the way you present yourself to the world - that you have to change. You can spend your whole life trying not to feel the way you feel, but you never truly will. On the other hand, you can invest a relatively short amount of time investing in changing how you react, and you can have great success. 

It takes hard work. It takes discipline. It takes prayer. It takes a little favor and a lot of forgiveness and even more persistence, but it's possible. 

So no, knowing that you're always made of the same dirt is not an excuse for not changing, for not growing, for not improving yourself, for not getting better. Rather, it's an invitation to grace - to learning to embrace yourself for who you are and who God made you to be. It's an invitation to humility - to accept that God made you out of this dirt for a reason. And it's an invitation to growth - because you can't change your dirt, but you do decide how you embody it.

And that's really all that any of us are doing on any given day - learning how to embody our dirt for the glory of God.