Now, somewhere along the line, we came to the collective, unspoken, erroneous conclusion that at least a few of the people I described yesterday are the world’s true saints.
Maybe not the ones who don’t think they have needs — the islands and continents of self-sufficiency. We are pretty sure that they are on a power trip. Like Daddy Warbucks, they aren’t nice to people on the way up because they don’t plan to come back down.
But somewhere in the remaining categories I described yesterday, a lot of us are convinced we can find the truly noble souls — the people who never admitted to their needs, or sought to address them.
If you’ve been sitting on your needs for 10, 20, 30, or 40 years and you’ve been taking consolation in the sneaking suspicion that you are God’s special gift to the world (or at least an over-bearing spouse and six selfish children) sorry — not true. You are co-dependent, conflict averse, or you are keeping score — but you are not a saint. Not for that reason anyway.
Remember what I said about the way that God made us?
He made us with needs — a need for God, a need for one another, a need for lots of other things and experiences. Things and experiences that give us strength to live another day, re-populate the world, expand our minds, enlarge our hearts, nurture our souls, enrich our lives, and give, as well as receive love.
When we live like islands or we refuse to acknowledge our needs things almost always go wrong spiritually:
We make ourselves into gods.
We make other people our gods.
We live lives that are narrow and dry.
We are filled with secret bitterness and regret over needs denied.
Or…
Our needs come back to bite us (right where you think they would) and we act up in misdirected ways to meet the needs we refused to acknowledge.
That’s not the price of sainthood. That’s the price of failing to own our in-need humanity — which is, I will say it again, God’s gift.
So what do we do with our needs? More tomorrow.