Editor's Note Taking the sting out By Darcy L. Fargo

July 3, 2024

I let the words sting me for days.

In the heat of an argument, I was told I’m “a fraud.”

I didn’t need to ask for an explanation. I knew what it meant. I’ve levied the accusation against myself lots of times. That’s why the phrase stayed with me for days; it was consistent with some of my insecurities and fears.
The person was talking about the fact that I share my experiences of God and my Christian faith both in this space and out in the world, but I also behave in ways that are anything but Christlike sometimes.

It’s 100 percent true. I do that. My biggest asset – my ability to use words – can also be my biggest liability.

While I can use words to share where I see God working in me and in the world, I can also use words to sharply cut down other people.

Using language to cut others down is just one way I sin, one thing I do that’s not Christlike. There are others – lots and lots of them.

I’m the person people are thinking of when they’re railing against organized religion saying things like, “the people I see praying in Church on Sunday are the same people I sinning at work on Monday.”

It’s one of the reasons I struggle with writing this column. I feel unworthy. I regularly think, “how am I qualified to share my relationship with the Lord and efforts to live a Christian life when I’m so bad at it?”

I know others who’ve told me they feel this way sometimes. They feel unworthy to share their faith and love of Christ knowing they’re not always successful at living it.

It was funny to me that I was sitting with this fear of being a fraud, these feelings of unworthiness, when I learned the NCC won a Catholic Press Award for my column (see the story here).

It was a reminder of something I need to relearn often: It doesn’t matter how I feel. My feelings aren’t God’s reality.

In God’s reality, every one of us – even me – is loved with and through our sinfulness, weaknesses, and feelings of unworthiness. While God loves when we accept his grace and overcome our sins, he can also work in powerful ways through our sinfulness and weaknesses. While we can be excessively tough on ourselves, God is merciful to us.

We can’t wait for only the perfect Christians/the perfect people to share God’s love with others; those people don’t exist. God has us, complete with all our imperfections and unworthiness, to do it instead.

God took the sting out of those words.