my pockets are filled with poverty.

I’ve been thinking about her all day.

She was hovering outside of my van before I could even get the door open, though I didn’t see her until I had one foot on the ground.
“Can you help me get my medication?”
The words came out in a rush, as if she’d been waiting for me all day to pull into the Walgreens parking lot.
“I’m sorry? What?” I was surprised by her nearness as I was still positioned halfway between the driver’s seat and the span of asphalt covering the empty parking space next to me; I was at the same time both in and out of the van.
She repeated her question a little impatiently, and less like a question this time. More like an imperative.

I’m sorry. I made her come out and say it.
“What do you mean help you?” (Just in case she meant help getting inside the building.)

“Well, pay for it,” she said and gestured her arms as if to add, “Dummy.”  (Which was warranted, I guess, if I actually came off appearing like I didn’t know what she meant.)
Quickly and firmly, I responded (well, firmly for someone who frequently misplaces her self-confidence).
“No. I can barely pay for my own.” Before I could completely push the mostly-false sentence into the air between us, she was gone. My son was still getting his seat belt untangled, missing the whole interlude, and I was glad.

Something burned in my cheeks.
It was shame.

But not because I hadn’t helped her.

And not because of her neediness. I’m okay with her neediness.

I was trying to name the unsettled feeling quivering in my chest when I reached the pharmacy counter, but the lady in line ahead of me was giving the pharmacist her account of the woman outside pestering everyone in the parking lot to buy her medicine for her. I looked at the floor, studied my shoes, tried to distract my son from the fact that there was a woman in the parking lot who had asked every person in sight to buy her medicine for her, and that to this point every single person had said no. Including me.
The lady in line was directed to the manager, whom I saw head outside. There was nothing to see by the time I had picked up my prescription and made my way to our van. I wondered if the parking lot lady ever got her medicine. I wondered what made her resort to asking strangers—lots of them—for help. She hadn’t looked poor, according to my working definition of what poor looks like. What did I know? I’ve never been poor, but I’ve been tight enough to ask for help. The difference is that I’ve got a circle three rings deep of people I could ask for help, none of them strangers.
I don’t know if I should have paid for her medicine or not. I’ve given handouts plenty of times, and I never know if it’s the best way to help. I try to follow the Spirit’s leading on a case-by-case basis there, and sometimes I’ve turned my car around to answer what I felt pressing roughly against my sense of self-entitlement. I don’t know if I was listening well for that prompting when the lady in the Walgreens parking lot was waiting outside my vehicle, expecting me to help.

But what I keep wrestling with isn’t the “should I or shouldn’t I have” part of the equation. What I keep turning over in my head was her presumption that I would help her. If you’d seen and heard the confidence she carried when she asked me, you’d know what I mean. It wasn’t a question as much as it was, Good, you’re finally here and you will help me. Maybe that comes from years of asking for help. Maybe it comes from years of people responding more kindly than I did. I don’t know.
What I can’t shake is that she didn’t seem embarrassed by her need. She bravely approached me, putting out an aura of confidence that I would do what she would ask me to. Not because she could make me, but because she had asked.

You thought this post was about whether or not we should help people when they ask for monetary assistance. But it’s not. It’s about prayer.

I’ve struggled to pray lately. It’s felt like work, and sometimes I get so frustrated by my own relentless beggary that surely, SURELY, the Lord must be tired of listening to my daily litany of neediness. I’ll be praying for an undivided heart until the day I die. I’ll be hanging my head in shame for things I know better than to love for as long as my jealous heart keeps beating in time to the rhythmic waltz of my idolatrous self-gratification. It’s this whole already-not yet part of following Christ that upsets my attempts to ward off those feelings of defeat.

I know I’m free and full in Christ.

I know I have His righteousness in place of my indebtedness to sin, but I also know that until He takes me home I will still have this daily throwdown with my defective affections. Which means I find myself with my head in my hands next to my Bible first thing in the morning, trying to feel worthy enough to open it.

I’m ashamed of my neediness.

I’m embarrassed that I was reveling in my anger the night before, that I found solace after a long day of parenting in a bag of lime tortilla chips (don’t judge), that I once again refused to believe that God actually loved me before I was able to offer Him something worth loving (hint: I still have nothing to offer; He still has loved me with all my nothing), that I felt a little charmed by that small brush with success.

I’m ashamed of the enormity of the fact that I love all things me-exalting on the regular, and to add to the confusing recipe of misplaced allegiances, I’m ashamed that I’m ashamed.

I feel the lump of pride in my throat that I have to swallow with my morning coffee when I approach the Almighty and ask Him to please, please just this one last time forgive me for what I thought I would be good enough to conquer yesterday.  

But I’m sitting here thinking bout the parking lot lady, full of gumption and unabashed ownership of her need for someone else to help her. Whether she should have been asking pharmacy customers or not is beside the point (and I hope, friends, you’ll keep that in mind). She asked with confident belief that someone would help her. She didn’t hang her head or grovel in the mud of self-loathing. If she could walk up, look a stranger in the eye, and ask for help without cycling through all the reasons you shouldn’t help her because she should have been good enough to help herself, then why can’t I understand grace deeply enough to immerse myself in the overflowing, gushing waters of no-strings-attached forgiveness that rise high and deep and wide around the foot of the cross?

Why can’t I just acknowledge that of course I can’t be good enough to skip the part of prayer that requires me to empty out all the ugly, willful poverty from the back pocket of my heart?  Why can’t I just bravely own my inability to alleviate the neediness of my self-destructing flesh? Why, after all I’ve studied about God’s goodness and steadfast, loyal love, do I believe that on some level He still wants to see a little groveling?
There’s humility and what John Piper calls “well-placed shame,” and then there’s the backwardly-dressed pride of long-lingering shame—the kind of shame we wrongly bear because we shouldn’t have thought we could be good enough in the first place.
And here’s what I want to say to you and me and the lady in the parking lot who probably already knows it:  Jesus died for our shame. He died for our unbelief. He died for the times we feel conflicted about talking to Him because we failed again to clean ourselves up right. He died for the misbelieving heart that thinks it has to do part of the saving and carry the heavier end of sanctification. Listen to me, there’s a time when our sin should shame us. Our disobedience to the Lord is a weighty thing and cannot be ignored in the life of the believer.
But if you think God is waiting to squash you for being unable to help yourself, then you’re forgetting that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. No condemnation. No misplaced shame. Jesus’ death on the cross covers the multitudes of willful disobedience we try to salvage and replant every morning. His blood spreads out over our blatant disregard for His holiness and the times we repress the whisper that tells us to uncover who we really are to that friend who desperately needs the rebirth and resurrection we’ve come to stake our lives and eternities on.
God knows we are weak.
If we weren’t weak, we wouldn’t need Him so much.

So, I’m reminding myself on this quiet Tuesday night that I need to quit being surprised by the poverty that seems to regenerate in my heart every day. The Kingdom has come, but it’s still coming. I’ll be needy until my lungs quit pushing air in and out of my body.
Jesus said, “Go and sin no more.”
Go.
Sin no more.

It’s simple.
When I lift my head from my hands in the thick blanket of early morning quiet, I can ask the Lord for help without groveling in a shame that He has already paid for. I can go and sin no more because He helps me to do it, not because I have no need for help. I need help. I need help, and I need to lift up my head and ask with confidence. Here is where the analogy falls apart, of course. I can ask for for a remedy to my daily diagnosis of abject soul poverty with steady confidence and a certainty based on truth rather than a parking lot full of exhausted resources.
Not because I can make the Lord help me.
But because He has promised to.

Because He already has.

He has saved me once and for all, but sometimes I feel like He is saving me every day still.

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9

“There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” Romans 8:1-2

“If I say, ‘My foot is slipping,’ Your faithful love will support me, Lord. When I am filled with cares, Your comfort brings me joy.” Psalm 94:18-19

 

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