You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese.

I am a good person. By that I don’t mean the quality of my existence, I am instead referring to my deep seated NEED to follow the rules. My horror at the thought of getting into trouble, letting others down. I buckle my seat belt. I recycle, I do unto others…

Do you know who else I would wager was a rule follower? Mary, mother of Jesus. She found favor with God. She was betrothed, a virgin, an obedient daughter and woman of Galilee.

Can you imagine the knee jerk horror that crashed down over her head when she realized that she was going to be pregnant? Ostracized, outcast, a disgrace, visibly marked by a sin that she did not even commit?

I have noticed, in scripture, that God works in unconventional ways. God uses those who are deeply flawed. The Holy Spirit manifests itself in ways that don’t toe the line of proper behavior. Dancing naked in the streets, transforming barres of water into wine, flipping the tables in church. Using embezzlers, foreigners, fallen women, the racial and cultural minorities. Thumbing its nose at the socially acceptable, sanctioned behaviors, people, and customs of the day.

It has been one of my most painful parts of my spiritual journey to realize that God works most powerfully in me when I am broken. When I feel raw and exposed and uncomfortable. When I am not coloring in the lines, but instead painting with big juicy swaths of ink splashed all over the paint by number template.

In fact, it is when I am not being good, not forcing myself into the mold of who I should be, that I feel most beloved by God. Most comforted, most treasured, most seen. In the midst of the chaos and dissonance of the disapproval of others, I crave the still small voice of my Creator the most. And I listen the hardest.

It’s when we are pushed beyond the boundaries of our own selves that we release our hands from the controls enough to allow God to operate. Imagine Mary, disgraced, far from home, great with child that has no humanly recognized lineage. For someone described as meek, placid, saintly, this must have been mortifying. Deeply, deeply uncomfortable. When we are at the very ends of our ideas of who we are and what we can stand, this is when God shows up.

This is when the story begins…