The Gospel According To Jerk

It seems like this has come in conversation a few times in the last few weeks. It came up last night, again. The fact that I spent years of my life being (committed to being, enjoying being) a jerk.

There were a lot of reasons for it, a lot of history behind it, but I'm not going to get into all that here. The fact is that a lot of people with a lot better reasons and a lot sadder histories have been less jerkier people.

And so people want to know what changed. And while I don't want to use this time as an excercise in self praise, I am a better person than I used to be.

But I don't praise myself for it. I praise God.

I didn't wake up one morning and decide to be nicer. I didn't read a book that changed my life. I met a man.

We had met before, but I hadn't really given him much of anything but lip service. He was the one and only Son of God and blah blah and so on.

What a life changing experience it was to discover that the things I had been saying were, in fact, true. They were as true as anything I had ever said or ever believed.

And I began to pray that this man, Jesus, might change me. Make me less self-involved and self-conscious and selfish. Less like me and more like him.

I've got a long way to go. I've long had a t-shirt idea for the Christian t-shirt market that reads, simply, "I'm a jerk...that's why I need Jesus". It gets to a lot of my personal testimony and the testimonies of those who have gone before for thousands of years.

We keep trying to get ourselves together. And we can't. And he can.

And so I spend my time now being (committed to being, enjoying being) a Christian. A Christian by its simplest definition, someone who believes Jesus Christ is Lord and acts accordingly. I don't always act accordingly, of course. In fact, I sometimes wonder if I can call myself a Christian if part of the criteria is being like Jesus.

I heard a great definition of a hypocrite once. A hypocrite is someone who claims to be something he has no intention of becoming.

For a long time, that was me. Claiming to be a follower of Jesus, but never really following him. Now I follow, some days closer than others. But Christlike is something I have every intention of becoming.

And I can see it working everyday. And I'm a little less of a jerk than I used to be.