If you were to call up your resume on the screen of your mind, what would it look like, what achievements would be listed, degrees completed, jobs held, lengths of stay?

I think there is a special folder in our brain that gets a lot of access, even though we try to cover the trail that is made to that folder. It's the How Are We Doing Folder? We keep our mental resume in it. It can be in various states of readiness, depending on how often we think we will need to pull it out and use it. Probably our toughest interview that we bring our resume to is ourselves. Maybe that's the way it should be, I'm no brain scientist, but maybe we should be the toughest on ourselves.

Sometimes I wonder just how tough though. If I were hiring today, I would probably lean more on what someone has done than what they say or what others say about them. I think the most impressive points for me in choosing someone to work with are what have you done and why and how well have you done it? Those are the kind of things that are prime on my mental resume.

The worst confusion for me is a difficulty caused by the perception of the space and time we are in now, or liminality. I have read and studied enough about recent and current culture to believe firmly that we are in a threshold time. It is not business as usual. I wish to heaven that it were. I wish that we could do things the way we used to. That would be so easy for me, so like comfortable hiking shoes in new and rugged terrain. But the simple reality that stares me in the face is, that this comfortable way of life is gone, as well as it's ways and means. My internal resume reflects this. It has declared and continues to declare that there are new thoughts, renewed thoughts, and new actions to be taken. Those are to be chalked up in my mind.

The chalk board has a different color chalk though. It is not the same white on black that others use to keep score of your acheivments. I'm afraid now that I would find that unacceptable. In fact, some of the things used to measure my life and ministry many years ago, I now find faulty at best.

This tension or confusion is an interesting phase in my life. It is the simple tension between how others perceive me or how I think they perceive me and how I see myself. As I get older, I tend to side with my perceptions even more. I probably have always done this, but due to my age, I can look back and ask some tough questions about what I've done, in order to see what I might do in the future.

If all this sounds a little soft or spongy, I am not surprised. But it is common, and we all do it, probably a lot more than we realize. Our brains just do it without asking for permission.

The question still remains though, how are you thinking about yourself, and what factors affect that thinking. It matters a great deal. One of the great paradoxes of Romans, all scripture for that matter is that on a macro level, we are a mess. Sin has made a mess of every life. Like a virus of the worst kind unleashed in your computer, you can barely get the software to run. But the virus has not only an antidote available but a whole new system to work from, a complete overhaul, leading to a much better state. Christ can hack the worst of us, can't He? In the end, it's His plan, His chalkboard, His characterization of us that is most profound. And we are not so micro in His eyes.

Coming to the middle chapters of Romans, I am swept away by the power and determination that God applies to my life, my mind. There is no condemnation He says, no counfusion but peace. Even when I do the things I don't want to do and don't do the things I know I should do, He still writes things on the chalkboard that glow. Really, He is writing about Himself, working in me of course.

That makes me feel pretty good about my internal resume. When he is doing the writing, I don't need to edit or correct Him at all. And I like what He is writing.