God’s Gift to the World

There are two ways you can hear the following phrase:

I am God’s gift to the world.

It’s all a matter of tone. The first way—the way you likely read it—is laden with arrogant posturing, filling even the most most ardent pacifist with the desire to do violence.

The second tone is rarer, likely impossible. It is the sound of humility; of the sincere belief that all that you have been given is there to be shared with others.

Each inflection is fictitious: nobody is purely one or the other. We despise the former because we recognize something of it in ourselves, and feel the latter is so far from possibility that we lather ourselves in protective layers of cynicism and irony.

But in the second sense is the terrifying, liberating truth that we are not our own. Lose the cynicism, lose the self-loathing, and just for a second believe that maybe the world (and, paradoxically, also you) will be richer for spending yourself as a lavish gift to the world.

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