The only thing I really remember about Popeye, besides his cans of spinach and bulging muscles, was his motto: “I yam what I yam.”
The Apostle Paul said it a little more clearly: “By the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain” (I Cor. 15:10). My life story is marked by a running conflict between the me forged over time by my imagination–tall, dark, and handsome…and strong–and the real me. The imagined me is Autonomous Me (sounds like a good band name). The real me, the one whom God sees, is desperately in need of him.
It seems to me that God uses various means to help us recognize our desperate need for him: loss, illness, financial distress, loneliness. Whatever his means, the aim is to reconstruct a person’s imaginative grooves. At the end of our rope, we realize that our very identity is being recast. What we worked so hard to forge over a lifetime has melted and we’re left wondering who we are. The word “Me”, being the final one in the prayer for the destitute (“God help me”) is the proper close of all prayers. You and I are, after all, the end purpose of prayer. Prayer is not so much for God’s benefit as it is for ours and this prayer forms us in a very special way.
This simple prayer for the destitute shapes our identity, particularly as we repeat it. It declares who God is, acknowledges what he will do for us, and establishes our relationship to him. Given time, a person who habitually prays in this fashion will embrace the reality of who she is: destitute.
I Corinthians 1:26-29 reminds us that this identity is not only true to reality, but a good thing. God chooses the foolish things of the world, the destitute: “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.”
How willingly we forget what God does not. He “knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalms 103:14) and he has pity on us as a result. You and I are dependent nobodies. It’s who we are. As Jim Eliot put it, “We are a bunch of nobodies trying to please somebody.” Anthony Esolen riffed on the same theme in his wonderful book, *Ironies of Faith*: “What can return foolish man to his senses? Little, if he is blessed by nature with the small gifts that veil his yawning insufficiencies. Some people, ‘vain in their imaginations,’ ‘professing themselves to be wise’ (Romans 2:21,22), lapse into comfort and self-satisfaction, as a fish swims easily and stupidly into a trap. Such ones are so full of all-important ephemera that they miss the miracle before them.”
Esolen’s words kick against our human sensibilities, but they’re true nonetheless. Being highly aware of our yawning insufficiencies opens our eyes to our dire need and to the daily miracle of God’s help on our behalf. A Christian’s daily habits should include a conscious confession of personal helplessness: I am what I am.
Our fathers and mothers of the faith have echoed that fact ever since Christ. “I am what I am” marks our identity and serves as a plumb line against which all other human claims are measured. “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Any statement out of alignment with that is a false one and will prove hollow over time.
benpalpant.com – life re-imagined
