My wife and I once made a small gift to a cause we cared about. It's been a few years, and we're still getting automated mailers from the organization. The envelopes declare "Urgent Need Inside!" or "Special Message For You: Open Now!" By now, they've probably spent as much on postage and glossy brochures as we sent them in the first place. Our gift became a monthly subscription to a junk mail service.

At the end of every school year, I always looked forward to getting the yearbook. The first thing I did was turn to the back, find my name, and see what pages had photos of me. After I saw those, I'd read through the rest of it. But when I read the final verses of Philippians, I didn't see how it related to me.

When I served as a campus minister at Harvard, I sometimes wondered if I belonged there. Everyone seemed to have themselves put together far better than I did. So, it was a relief when a student I invited into leadership told me he was a mess and confessed his struggles. I emailed him back, "I am lazy, judgmental, perfectionistic, hypocritical... and dealing with the reality of who I am is too much for me. And pretending I have it all together is a bunch of horse backwash."

From the Auschwitz death camp, the Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe wrote to his mother, "Do not worry about me or my health, for the good Lord is everywhere and holds every one of us in his great love." Soon after he wrote this, on the morning of July 29, 1941, ten men were condemned to death by starvation as punishment for another prisoner's escape. But then Kolbe stepped forward and offered to take the place of one of them. The deputy camp commander accepted the sacrifice. After enduring two weeks without food or water, he was killed with an injection of carbolic acid on August 14th.

An anonymous poster to an online forum wrote, "I am a new Christian. I sin a lot. I am such a bad person. I insult others, I usually get angry at other over small things, I lust after women. I get jealous, I am a envious person. My heart is not right. I am wondering if God still loves a sinner like me." When we look at our many faults, it's easy to think God has rejected us, too.