The chief torturer of my soul,

is not the devil, not my deceased dad, not others.  The chief torturer is me.  And what this tortured soul wants in this life, in my less sane moments, more than anything else in the whole wide world, is to be accepted and enjoyed by TheGreatestJerkOnThePlanetToDaveMcCarty.  Dave McCarty is a cruel taskmaster to me, and will not cut me any slack at all.  No grace.  Dave McCarty will not give me acceptance and enjoyment, just as I am: I have to earn it.  Dave McCarty has integrity about granting acceptance and enjoyment, especially to me.  It’s not grace, but a merit system.  When I perform well, make great decisions, Dave McCarty will extend limited acceptance and limited enjoyment to me, but his acceptance and enjoyment are limited to right now, because Dave McCarty is always looking down the road to the next opportunity for me to fail/succeed, and so Dave McCarty withholds unconditional acceptance and enjoyment of me, because he has to wait and see if I really deserve to be accepted and enjoyed.  I see it now like never before.  Constant pressure to perform well.  Terrible way to live.

But in my saner moments, after I’ve been freshly convicted of my prideful, conditional, self-acceptance, I’m able to extend the same grace to myself, that my ShepherdJesus extends to me, and suddenly the whole world looks amazingly different.  Ahhh.  And I find that it’s so much easier to extend grace to others, when I’m able to extend grace to myself.

–DumbSheepDave, living with more freedom and reckless abandon than ever before, sometimes, because folks have been praying, hoping the pre-believers around him are noticing the difference Jesus is making

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