I Want to Be Like You

A Jesus-follower once told me he wanted to be like me. It was one of the most disarming things I've ever had said to me. My instinctive response was to say, "You need to set your sights way higher!" If he only knew the mess that is really me. Sure, on the outside I can project a pretty good image of faith and level-headedness. Inside I am a quagmire of mixed motivations, selfishness masquerading as righteousness, uncertainties, and competing loyalties. Sometimes it's as though I hold on to faith in Jesus by a thread. In fact, I hold on to it by the grace of God only.

Thomas Merton says we have a false self and a true self. The false self is the image we work hard to present to those around us. It is a person that is the product of tireless effort to shape and project. The real self, he says, is that which we fear the most - one that is utterly nothing except for the image of God lovingly infused in us, and the one that is completely without hope were it not for the infusion of an incarnational God. Health and salvation, Merton asserts, is facing and accepting the real self, and thereby being open to the complete embrace of God.

If that's what another person sees and seeks in me, that's good. I don't want people to see me; I want them to see Christ in me. The only way that happens is for people to recognize that my only hope is in Jesus. I'll see you around the next bend in the river.