I was talking with a friend yesterday…
He’s got a good job, a great laugh, monstrously awful luck at picking out girlfriends, and some bad choices that have become bad habits. He is, in short, like many of us. 
He’s also had a severe lack of people around him in his life to speak truth into him, to offer him life instead of death, blessings instead of cursings, hope instead of resignation.
You know this guy… he’s from a good family… has opportunity given to him… but in a series of what in the moment seem like small decisions, he makes a few bad choices… and then a few more… and before you know it, he’s saddled with an addiction (or two or three), stuck in a rut (which seems to those closest him like it might as well as be a cavern) and soaked in gasoline, dancing with lighters.
The conversations with friends and family go from “So what’s new” to “you know i love you” to “you’re such a screw up, and embarrassing us all.” Words spoken from frustrated people with a vague desire to motivate end up stabbing the frail vessel in which he holds hope, and eventually, hearing it enough, he begins to repeat “I am a failure and will never amount to anything. The pieces are too many to pick up, the fractured relationships ruined beyond possibility of hope.”
The child, perhaps, reckless with hedonism, who leaves family values to pursue my own system, slamming the door as she leaves. The only pigsty she made it to was in the front yard, and there she sits now, lacking the prodigal father* to come out to her… stuck in place by the friends and family whispering pious commendation, stone after stone in a backpack of shame, as they shuffle past her to and from the place she once called home.
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So we were talking yesterday… he was having a bad day. I told him I loved him. He rebuffed that (because CLEARLY if I won’t marry him, I don’t really love him), and I took that moment to call out the crap.
To tell him that I DO love him.
That I see in him dignity and beauty and grace and wholeness.
That in his blindspot is his inability to see his worth.
You make me sound like a good person… you know I’m not, right?
That none of us is good… that we’re all miserable screw-ups who fall short of perfection time and time again.
That his past doesn’t get to define him. 
That his name is not Failure… is not Falling Short… is not Stupid.
No one says these things… you know, that, right?
That he carries in him the weight of the glory of his Maker.
That this burden of rejection is not his to carry.
That he’s not alone.
People don’t say those things unless they want something from you
That I will believe in his worth for him until his eyes are able to see.
That others speak lies because they are broken themselves and can’t believe hope.
That he is more than the sum of his mistakes, and that there is a way out.
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There are broken individuals everywhere. He waits on me in the restaurant… she motions me across the street… They giggle with camera outstretched to get the buildings in the background… They huddle with newspapers and blankets in doorways… stride their suits into elevators and jump in puddles.
They have been told by father, boss or spouse, you’ll never measure up.
They’ve been ditched by mother, lover or friends and heard I’m screwing up their lives, too– I’m better off alone.
Or they’ve succeeded brilliantly, turned to smile to the crowd, and found their opposers busy looking off into the distance (oh how a crowd gathers when we fail, but disappears for success) … It wasn’t all that important anyway
And they’ve then turned to look in the mirror, and have decided that their failure is their identity, so there’s no use in trying to be any different, because there’s no hope.
These are the brilliant creatures from whom we get our lunch sandwiches… with whom we laugh at the coffee machine… at whom we roll our eyes when they insist on walking so slowly in front of us… for whom we cook dinner in the evenings.
*
These are them, starving for a word of encouragement, for someone in their corner, saying “you are more than the sum of your failures. And I love you no matter what, and I choose to see you brimming with life and beauty. And I believe in hope, even on the days that you don’t. And I’m not walking away.”
*prodigal: wastefully extravagant. It is my position and that of some of my favorite authors, that the Father in Scriptures is the prodigal one… to spend in excess love, shower it over people, drown them in grace… this is Him. However wastefully high we may think we can run our tabs, he’s there to one-up us, to be even more wasteful, even more “beyond all reason” with his mercy and forgiveness.
