Just as I am....

You’re fine just as you are.

You’ve heard it many times. It’s one of the mantras of our age. It’s a message of self-acceptance, unconditional love, reassurance, often used to counteract feelings of shame, inadequacy, or the pressure to be perfect.

I was thinking of this recently while seeing a message on the tube in London. “You are loved and wanted in London” is a campaign from the Mayor of London’s office. I admire his confidence but how does he know? Who loves the hordes of lonely people in bedsits & routine jobs who seldom talk to their neighbours and think they need to be more pretty, clever, and have a better social media profile to be worth loving? Is a poster on the tube going to convince them they are? A Council Tax bill from Wandsworth Council hardly works as an expression of love.

Now there seem to me two ways of thinking of this message. One, a more indulgent and lazy way, is to say that we are exactly fine just as we are. Love yourself. Your thoughts, desires, longings, habits are all to be affirmed and not questioned. Nothing needs to change for you to feel good about yourself.

If we stop for any serious amount of personal reflection, we recognise that all kinds of unwanted desires well up within our souls. We waste our time doomscrolling on social media, entertain malicious thoughts about other people, cultivate habits that in our heart of hearts know will ultimately destroy us if we don’t bring them under control. And being told all this is fine doesn’t work.

But there is a second way of thinking about this message. When the Victorian hymn writer Charlotte Elliott wrote the famous hymn ‘Just as I am’, she offered a different way of thinking of this. The hymn acknowledges our internal conflicts and confusions:

“Just as I am though tossed about
with many a conflict, many a doubt,
fightings and fears within, without.”

She urged singers of the song to bring themselves, just as they were, messed up and confused, before God. She was convinced that, despite these things, we are loved and accepted, not by the Mayor of London, but by the God who made us and who died for us in his son Jesus Christ.

I was reading a book on Luther’s doctrine of justification the other day & came across this:

Suppose your child were to ask you, “Dad, Mum, what do I have to do to be your child?” Is there some law, some deed, some program you could propose? Perhaps the first thing you would have to do would be to weep that the question could ever be raised. But what could you say? What do you have to do to be my child? “Nothing. Just listen. Believe me. You are my child, I love you, I will never let you go.”

That is what justification by faith means. We are accepted as we are. We are children of our heavenly father and simply invited to believe that and live out of it. But that doesn’t mean we stay as we are. Implicit within this vision is an impetus for change, for moral renewal, for spiritual growth, but not one driven by a desperate need to please.

You are fine as you are. You are accepted as you are. Knowing that is precisely the impetus we need to work on those destructive desires, those depressing habits, to pursue virtue, goodness - holiness if you like - free from anxiety and guilt, yet eager for change.