The other day, I was told my debate skills and ability to sell were deficient in comparison to my critic’s and another local luminary’s. I mulled his words, slept on them, mulled them some more, slept on them some more, and then replied by email. This is the part of the email relevant to what I’m supposed to write about today:
“Many times have I been told not to worry about selling anyone on anything. Over and over I am told to concentrate only on going about it as I’ve been trained and am shown to do, and I am not graded by my success in this world. This helped me grow out of trying to measure up to and admire/covet my father’s and his father’s business accomplishments in this world.
“I received some additional nudging in that direction when I was told in March 2001, as I slept in a doorway on Fleming Street: “You will fail, but you might enter the Kingdom of God.” After that, I didn’t expect to succeed, ever. I expected to lose, always. I can’t think of any time I have been able to persuade you about anything.”
In fact, I see little evidence that I succeeded at anything I undertook on this world after being told in March 2001 that I would fail.
A few hours after hearing that, this poem leapt out of me:
I know what it is to love fully,
have my heart broken by death
and by loved ones’ rejections,
Over and over again,
So I can love even more.
I know what it is to be engulfed in pain,
Awash in evil,
Terrified, enraged, despaired,
Believing God has again forsaken me,
Then be given the truth
that again makes me free.
I know what it is to doubt,
Be lost and wandering
time and time again,
Then be rescued yet again
and my faith grows deeper.
I know what it is to blindly trust,
Then be destroyed by betrayal
time and time again,
Until I trust only God.
I know what it is to have much
and be completely of this world,
Then have it all taken away
and be in the world but not of it.
I know what it is to fail in this world,
And fail and fail and fail:
The world’s greatest failure,
I can serve only God.
I know what it is to give
and give and give and give;
I cannot stop giving
because giving is receiving.
I know what it is to explain God
time after time after time again.
Something demands I keep explaining:
Maybe someone will listen,
Maybe me.
I quickly connected that jolting advisory to a prayer I had made in early January 1987. I was in the depth of despair, at the end of my rope, out of bright ideas, feeling like a total failure as a man, knowing my goose was cooked if I didn’t get help:
“Dear God, please help me. I don’t want to die like this, failed . . . I offer my life to human service.”
God has a really bizarre sense of humor. The very thing I feared the most was given to me as my spiritual path: failing by what then was my standard of measure, the standard of measure of my father and his father, the standard of measure of this world.
Sloan Bashinsky