One of the scariest, most destructive aspects of sin is its ability not only to blind us, but to blind us to our blindness.
Paul David Tripp, Journey to the Cross, Day 14.
One of the biggest struggles I faced when my husband died was the feeling that I no longer knew who I was. It seems odd, but when the person in the world who knows you the very best is suddenly gone, it’s just weird. Part of it is that our identity gets so wrapped up in our relationships, you’re someone’s spouse, someone’s child, or someone’s parent. When that is suddenly ripped away, it tends to shake us to the very core. But Psalm 139 is a beautiful illustrative reminder of our true relationship with the creator, the one who knows us even better than we know ourselves. It took a while, but I eventually emerged as the person I had always been, not the same, but not foreign either. I was acutely aware of my blindness.
But Tripp is talking about a more subtle blindness where we lose an accurate view of ourselves because our sin is clouding our view. Those times when we become so comfortable that we create “pockets of personal spiritual blindness that will result in functional inaccuracies in the way I see, examine, and assess myself. This results in thinking I am more righteous, mature, consistent, or godly than I actually am, because there is sin of thought, desire, attitude, word, or action that I do not see or assess properly ” (p 86).
My process involved journaling. I so missed having someone to come home and share my day with, share my innermost thoughts, that I began coming home and just writing those things I so desperately wanted to share with him. In that journal is a page I dogeared because it was the day it dawned on my that I was clinging to a relationship with a dead person, when I believed in a living God. That day my conversation changed from what I wanted to tell someone who was dead, who I thought knew me better than anyone else and started talking to the God who created me and knows me better than I even know myself. Tripp wants to encourage us to “forsake forever the believe that no one knows you better than yourself” (p 87). He’s calling us to the daily awareness that no one knows us better than He who created us. He knitted us together from the very beginning, what He makes is wonderful and precious to Him. Nothing I do can change that, It’s more than I can understand, It’s more than I can imagine. My full potential is found only in surrender to Him (Psalm 139, PSV).
the psv 