Is Righteousness Right? . . .

“Mary, you have a strong sense of right and wrong,” my dad told me one morning in the car after eating pancakes together at a little restaurant across town. I blushed, embarrassed at the compliment, but happy for this gift. I was no more than nine or ten the morning he said that, but I distinctly remember both parents telling me similar things throughout my childhood.

Then things changed . . .

“Mary, you have a strong will! Why can’t you admit you’re wrong?” my mom would say, while my dad would agree, “you’re pretty stubborn alright!” This baffled me. How did I switch from being the angelic little girl with a big heart for righteousness, to the stubborn teen that could never admit a fault?! I don’t think I ever really changed. The truth is, I want to be righteous or, in other words, I want to be right.

I know what’s right and I know how right looks. I’ve always wanted to do and be “right.” Then I failed. And failed and failed and failed. Ack, it’s hard to admit a failure when your goal is righteous living. Of course I can say I’m living righteously because I love God and want to please Him with my life. But maybe this is an excuse? Maybe righteousness is not God’s goal at all, but a product of the journey to His goal. Maybe the goal is perfect love and communion with Him. Maybe the journey is intentionally riddled with failures and struggles and maybe these are what produce righteousness in the heart.

My friend said he saw me mistaking God’s goal for my life, in a way. He brought up Job, who was righteous, but still struggled and, at times, felt like he had fallen flat on his face. By looking at his life and how much he succeeded at, or how many close friends he had, or what a great wife he married, or how doing the righteous thing seemed to further God’s kingdom in his world, one would think he had been the vilest of sinners after God let Satan deal with him. Truth be told, I don’t think we’ll ever know God’s specific goal for our lives. We won’t know where we actually fail and where we actually succeed. As C said in his blog:

"The sign of God's pleasure is not an unbroken string of successes, but an irrationally dogged determination in the face of repeated failure."

No one but the Creator of the maze knows which turn was wrong.