God Knows Us Better Than We Know Ourselves
I've always been drawn to St. Peter. While I imagine he had great confidence in his skills as a fisherman, he does not appear to have believed himself capable of much greater than that. Mark's Gospel especially portrays him as always messing something up, always getting it wrong, always kind of stumbling along. Even at his greatest moment, when he confessed Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the Living God, for which Christ offers him the greatest compliment and certainly the greatest of confidence boosters, by telling him that God is working in him, and declaring this Peter to be the rock upon which Christ would build his Church - immediately following this Christ accuses him of being Satan, because he still just gets it wrong.
That's the beauty of Peter. He gets knocked down, and he keeps getting back up. What I've come to realize recently is that one of the greatest blessings Christ could have ever bestowed upon Peter was by telling Peter that he would thrice deny Jesus. By telling him this, how much more powerful it was, and great a confidence builder, when after the resurrection Christ then thrice asks him to feed his sheep! By predicting the denial, by telling Peter that he knew he would act cowardly, Jesus is also telling him, "Peter, I knew that you would fall, but I also know what truly lies within you. I would not entrust my sheep to you if, just as I knew you would deny me, so also do I know that you will capably lead my Church, and when asked, you will even die for them just as I died for you."
How much is Peter like me, like us? How often do we fall? How often do we deny our Lord? But Christ does not judge us by our failings, because he knows that we are greater than that, better than that, and just as Peter received the gift of the Holy Spirit that enabled him to become what God was asking of him, so too do we have that same gift available to us. So if Christ does not judge us by our failings, let us not judge ourselves by them, either. We are called by God, called to be his children, called to be his Church. We are called to be holy, called to be courageous, called to be humble - we are called to be all this and more. Yet for what we give to God, he provides in abundance back to us. We give to God our desire for holiness, our desire for courage, our desire for humility, our desire for faith, our desire for hope, our desire for love - our desire for every virtue, and just by giving him that desire, he fills our cup with grace, good measure and overflowing.
This human journey is full of pitfalls, shortcomings, sin and error. But we must remember always what Augustine tells us, that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, He knows us better than we know ourselves. It is for this reason that God does not judge us by these shortcomings, so nor should we. Let us judge ourselves by virtue of being children of God, and accept the grace to grow in our Father's love.