Hope for a New Soul

A few weeks ago my Pandora station introduced me to a song that stopped me dead in my paper-writing tracks. As I stopped whatever assignment I was working on to listen to the lyrics, my immediate and overwhelming desire was to exclaim a resounding “amen, sister” to the artist. Yael Naim, a musical philosopher of the soul in my opinion, hit upon something profoundly true about the human experience (or atleast my human experience) when she recorded this song. These are the words to the first verse:

I'm a new soul
I came to this strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit 'bout how to give and take
But since I came here, felt the joy and the fear
Finding myself making every possible mistake

  I don’t know about you, but the part about “making every possible mistake” hit home with me. I feel like a screw-up pretty frequently. At the end of any given day, I can look back on the events that unfolded and see my glaringly obvious flaws with obnoxiously pristine 20/20 hindsight. A careless or misspoken word to a friend, a mishap at work, a missed opportunity to ask a needed question in class, the list could go on. I’ll conclude my time as a seminary student in three weeks when I graduate, but I think I’ll still feel like a student – a student of life. I’m constantly inundated with new experiences, situations I don’t know how to handle, emotions I’ve never felt before, questions I’ve never thought to ask before now. I often feel like I’m trying to sort out the cards I’ve been dealt within the context of a game I don’t fully understand. And just when I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of things and I somehow do something that leads to a minor victory, an unforeseen obstacle or setback deflates my proud ego. As Naim puts it, I’m just a new soul. In a decidedly strange world.

   So, maybe you don’t relate to anything I’m saying. But for my fellow newbies out there who are with me on this, I’d ask this question: At the end of the day, how do we know if our triumphs outweigh our failures? There’s the cliché saying about learning from your mistakes, but is any error really excusable by just dismissing it as a “learning experience”? And, when we lay down to go to sleep at night, who are we? Are we just the culmination of the decisions we made that day? For example, if I make a mistake at work does that make me a terrible employee? If I blurt out an overly-critical remark to someone I care about, does that make me a bad friend? If I do poorly on a test am I a failure as a student? These are the kind of identity defining questions that can keep us lying awake for hours. Perhaps at the root of all of this is the very basic question, “by what standard do we measure ourselves and our lives?” Our standard of measurement will determine how we view ourselves, how we interpret our actions, and how we define mistakes versus successes.

  Ok, I’m getting a little philosophical, I know. This is just a blog, not a manifesto (but I’ll let you know when I decide to publish a response to Kant or Nietzsche). But, as I thought about Naim’s song, I asked myself all of the questions I listed above. And this may sound simplistic, but I’m going to go ahead and give you my honest answers. At the end of the day, who am I? Well, I find immense relief in knowing that I am a follower of Jesus and a daughter of God, regardless of anything that may have happened over the course of the day. And by what standard do I measure myself and my life? By God’s standard- which is found in His word to humanity, aka the Bible. In my last post I talked about God’s justice, and I am fully aware that when a rightfully earned guilty verdict was headed my way, Jesus stepped in. He applied my guilt to himself and he suffered the penalty that would have, should have, been mine when he went to the cross. And then, to show that he was not only a man, but actually God in the flesh, he came back to life – actually defeating death and serving as a physical picture of the power of God. Call me crazy, call me a total newb who needs to get her head on straight. But, when I lay down to sleep at night, I rest peacefully knowing that I have been rescued from the death penalty and adopted into God’s family. So, even though I’m a new soul, I have the benefit of a relationship with the one who created this strange world. And as I continue to make messes on a daily basis, I have the relief of knowing that no hole I dig myself into can undo what Jesus has done for me. Because of that I can listen to songs like these and laugh as I see myself in their lyrics. I know there are plenty more mistakes waiting for me down the road, but I think there is grace up ahead as well.