Since I can remember, enormous craters of insecurity and inadequacy have pocked the landscape of my soul. 

We all have these holes of the heart. Some are common to all children of Adam and Eve. Others are unique to each person, carved out by the impact of particular events on a particular kind of clay. 

My specific craters are vacuums of longing for acceptance, approval, and affirmation. I’ve attempted to ignore, cover, and fill these vast holes through people pleasing, perfectionism, and religious activity, which, as you’d imagine, only made them larger.

Discovering what initially formed these craters has been of some help, but only as a starting place. I sometimes fall into the thinking of our hyper-therapeutic culture that conflates trauma awareness with healing, as if knowing when and how an asteroid hit the earth automatically rebuilds the house it decimated. Answers are not a substitute for reconstruction, though they may help lay a foundation. 

Tracing wounds to their source has been part of God’s plan for my wholeness and may be part of his plan for yours. But thankfully, knowing exactly how and why we are the way we are isn’t always a prerequisite for healing.

What is a prerequisite is honestly acknowledging that we have these holes — both unmet desires and unmended defects — and that we are powerless to fill and fix them. 

If this acknowledgement leads only to shame, it has done us no good. Self-condemnation is just another way to play god and judge of our own lives. True surrender orients toward God, not self. Like Peter sinking on the waves, our desperate need should cause us to reach out for rescue (Matt. 14:30).

A prayer called The Litany of Humility says…

Jesus, meek and humble of heart deliver me…
from the desire of being esteemed,
from the desire of being loved,
from the desire of being extolled…

The list goes on. Then it says,

Deliver me…
from the fear of being humiliated,
from the fear of being despised,
from the fear of suffering rebukes…

It concludes with,

Grant me the grace to desire…
that others may be esteemed more than I,
that others may be chosen and I set aside…

It’s a beautiful prayer, rightly prayed — oriented towards God’s goodness and grace. 

It’s a harmful prayer, wrongly prayed — oriented toward my own deficiencies, or asking God to kill desires that God wants to fill.

The imperative word in the prayer is deliver. Help comes from outside, from a Higher Power, as the Twelve Steps say. We cooperate, to be sure, but the power is from above. Drowning Peter used some muscle to hold onto the rescuing hand of Jesus, but no one would say he was saved by his own arm.

Often we dread how Jesus will deliver us, fearing the pain of transformation. But I’ve found Jesus to be consistently kind in his means of deliverance.

Jesus delivers us through embrace when we expected punishment. 

He delivers us through stripping away, not to humiliate or shame, but to liberate us to share his glory (2 Thes. 2:13 – 14).

He delivers us as we make amends with those we’ve hurt, stay in conscious contact with God, and discern how to prefer the person in front of us.

Cooperating in this deliverance — allowing the terrain of our soul to be filled and leveled and remade — is costly. But it costs less than the alternative: digging deeper holes with shame and self-effort. Christ is always there, arm outstretched, patiently waiting for us to put down the shovel and reach for his hand.