As I sit here in the midst of battling despair, jobless, homeless, penniless, lonely. Forced to look back on a life of failures and bad decisions, reflecting on how little I have progressed in the plan I’m certain God still has in place for me. Living off the charity of my brother and his wife. Fighting the overwhelming sense of lifelong failure. Wondering what it is that God wants me to learn in this situation.

It occurred to me that we have a universal skewed outlook on our own lives and the lives of all around us. We all have this unacknowledged list in our heads of the way things ought to go and how our lives ought to be. A stubborn belief that we are alone in not being able to obtain the “oughts” we have on our list and a perverse filter that assumes all around us are effortlessly fulfilling theirs. The acme of arrogance that assumes we have the answers and we know the way that is somehow frustratingly blocked in our own lives and yet easily successful in the lives of those around us.

Sure, everybody in the world ought to have love in their lives. Everyone is talented in their own way and needs to be acknowledged for those talents and allowed to use them for their own fulfillment and the betterment of the society around them. All of us deserve to be healthy, vibrant and active. We all have the best sense of humor. Everyone needs a job and a living wage and achieve the glow that comes from contributing. Everyone has taste and fashion sense unique among our neighbors. We are all unrecognized geniuses. We are all beautiful people. Doggone it! We deserve it.

The ignored and avoided truth is that this is absolutely not the case. We are idiots, ne’er-do-wells, selfish, lazy, stupid, cruel, oafish, neanderthal, troglodytes at some level or other.

Love is by no means universal. Loneliness runs rampant. Most of us are not working to our potential. We are by no means as creative, intelligent or funny as we believe ourselves to be. In some deep recess we grudgingly admit that everyone around us has surpassed our levels and we personally resent that and the resentment somehow contributes to building an even stronger filter to keep that thought from occupying center stage.

How does God reasonably expect us to become perfect and holy with this basic universal flaw? We blithely avoid the reality of living an imperfect life in an imperfect world with seemingly imperfect tools to deal with it all.