Jesus is for Losers

So I am a self-improvement junkie. I'm frustrated by lack of progress, and I really like hitting milestones. Last year I really got into weight lifting, and a big part of it was constantly setting PRs (personal records). It was cool to lift more and more each time I went to the gym. Life, however, rarely indulges my addiction.

Instead, I flirt with depression regularly. For me, depression is like that creepy thing in the haunted house that is eventually going to jump out from behind a corner and scare the daylights out of you. I hate depression.

I'm also a mean mommy. It's really obvious when you lift five pounds more than last time. It's not obvious when you've yelled at your kids one less time this week than last week. I can get totally lost inside my head about really dumb things. The most recent dumb thing was madly searching the internet for the best toilet tab/deoderizer thing. When I get lost in my own head, I am short tempered with my children and husband. It is ugly.

Thankfully, Jesus is for Losers.

Back in my early teens, one of the few times I got dropped off at Planet Music to wander the aisles of CDs, I found a Steve Taylor album with a song called "Jesus is for Losers". This song while musically unmemorable made grace make sense for me.

One of my despairs in my teen years was that I could not understand the book of Romans. This made me feel really stupid. So I'd read stuff like this in Romans 7, and it'd only made the vaguest of impressions:

...but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

In "Jesus is for Losers", Taylor writes:

Just as we are
At a total loss
Jesus is for losers
Broken at the foot of the cross

Just as I am
Pass the compass, please
Jesus is for losers
I'm off about a hundred degrees

And I got it. This was my first glimpse that the Jesus thing wasn't a self-improvement thing. The Jesus thing isn't about shiny, happy, happy all the time. Or in my case, academic all-star, well-behaved all the time.

Of course, there are moments of heart-bursting joy, of beauty that seems unbearable. But I'm a "mature" Christian who is still scared of the depression monster, who still yells at her kids inappropriately, who gets lost in the internet looking for the perfect toilet tab.

Twenty years ago, this song introduced the idea that Jesus is for us while we are lost in our darkness, before we get ourselves cleaned up. And by cleaned up, I mean clean like my two year old after he "cleans up" by evenly smearing his melted ice cream over both hands.

I've been thinking about this idea of "saying yes to Jesus". Initially, I thought of it like saying yes to a marriage proposal. Like YES! Definitely, YES! Woohoo. Let's get this party started.

But lately, I've been thinking that an equally important yes is the small, desperate yes. When I am depressed, yes to Jesus is the tiniest pinprick of light in my darkness, and it takes all my energy to offer it. This is the loser's yes. This is the loser saying with Paul, "What a wretched woman I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Jesus is for losers. Praise be to God.