I’m a fraud. I’m not nearly the person I have the reputation of being. I wish I were. That’d be awesome. But I’m not.
It’s not that I intentionally mislead people. It’s just that I’m not as good or holy as people think I am.
My friend Todd once commented on how his prayer life was deeper from having been around mine. When he said that, I was in the middle of a prayer wasteland. His words were so kind, but they rattled round inside my empty hollowness.
This gap between how I feel about myself and how others perceive me used to bother me more than it does now. And that’s because I read the Hunger Games books. Yep, the dystopian trilogy that ended up as four movies.
The Hunger Games books do something the movies simply can’t do: They give the internal thoughts and feelings of the main character, Katniss Everdeen. By being image-based, movies give us an exterior view of a story. But by being word-based, books excel at giving us an interior telling.
It was in her interior monologues that I discovered something about Katniss: She is a saint.
Throughout the trilogy, Katniss continually questions her motivations for doing the things she does. And she never lives up to the standard she sets for herself. She sees her selfishness and names it as such. She plays to the cameras and hates it. She is dishonest and even manipulative in relationships and loathes herself for it. But time after time, she makes the right choice and does so by sacrificing herself.
She acts heroically while accusing herself of villainy. But the people around her see the truth she can’t see. She really is a hero.
This is the saint’s perspective. We see every flaw in ourselves. We see every miscue, ever manipulation, every deviation. We criticize and accuse ourselves, finding ourselves guilty. We dwell on moments of misbehavior and miss out on the consistent shape of our stories.
But those around us see the bigger picture. They don’t drill down on details. They see the contours of the landscape of our lives.
Even as she cuts corners here and there, Katniss displays a high moral character. Her self-critical interior monologue proves this, which is why I cherish the books but can dispense with the movies. (Though I have to admit that actress Jennifer Lawrence did an amazing job of communicating something of Katniss’ interior angst through her facial expressions of conflicting emotions.)
These are the kinds of stories we need to keep telling ourselves. Saint stories. Stories of people who sacrifice themselves for others, making consistent moral decisions while chiding themselves wherever they fall short. We need this moral acuteness.
I need this moral acuteness.
I look at myself and say, “Fraud.” But I know that others look at me and say, “Friend.”
Where the face looking back at me in the mirror is bald-headed and showing the lines of age. The face my friends see is the face of years of relationship, with hundreds of shared stories.
I am a fraud, because I don’t live up to the person I think I ought to be. But I’m also a saint, because I’m being made into a person beyond what I’ve ever thought possible for myself. There are forces at work on me and in me that are shaping me into someone holy, different, prayerful, gracious, true, and good.
This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. [1 John 3:19-20]