I read an article recently about Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Many of you probably read the literary work in school, and I did too. As a high school student, I found the concept of a man inexplicably turning into an insect rather inane and melodramatic. But this autumn, as I battled the bugs that seek refuge in our home, and as I read about the pest that Kafka’s character becomes, I identified with his plight.
One of my deepest fears is to become an annoyance to the people I care about the most. To be reduced to an irritating buzz in their ears. To lose touch with reality and be unable to understand even my own interactions with others. Or worse, to become a person that even I don’t want to be around. I have this sense that I am far less than I should be, and constantly worse than I want to be.
People change. It’s a fact of life. But I spend very little time thinking about how I’m changing, and in what ways. Dr. Jordan Peterson said, “Don’t make your kids make you dislike them,” but in what ways am I making me dislike myself?
I worry. I complain. I get flustered easily. I say critical things without thinking. I stress myself out over things I can’t control. I am paralyzed by doubt. I can never seem to measure up. I feel more like Kafka’s creature than I feel like a person, and it’s so obvious that I can’t help but feel ashamed of my own inability to cope. Why am I like this? Why do I feel that there is something terribly wrong or out of place?
Maybe because there is. I didn’t just wake up as a bug one day. In my living memory, I have always been a bug. But I know that this is not what I was made to be.
If you’re like me, you don’t like to dwell on the darker parts of yourself. You shove them in the closet, where your skeletons belong. But the funny thing is, like me, you’re actually a bug, and your skeleton is on the outside.
So when we are forced to confront these darker parts of ourselves, what do we do? I know what I’ve done in the past. People have poked me right in the exoskeleton and revealed the darkness to me, whether intentionally or unintentionally. And usually, I laugh it off. Ah, yes, I’m a bug! Isn’t it hilarious? Sometimes, I avoid it. No, if you squint, you can see that I’m actually human. Oftentimes, I say, “I’m working on it.” But really, I mean, Get back in the closet. And it might, for a little while. But it will never go away.
On my own terms, I take them back out of the closet and examine them. I can polish a cockroach’s shell, but I can’t ever make it clean.
That’s when I realize to avoid Gregor’s fate, I need God. I became a bug by my own free will, but I can never become a person without him. When I care more about how other people view me than how God views me, I begin to believe that I can never be anything more than a disgusting creature. All my efforts to “work on it” may help me molt and grow, but I’m still a vermin, moved only by evolutionary instinct or humanist pride.
God contests this conclusion, and confirms the disquiet in my spirit that something is profoundly wrong with this view.1 God breathed life into me, and I am more than the sum of my mind, soul, and body. It is Christ and his salvation that gives me the strength to endure true transformation so I can become who I was meant to be. I can change laterally, exchanging my bad traits for different bad traits, and my good traits for different good traits, but to actually change for the better, I need the source of all goodness. When people set their minds to something, they often fail. When people turn to God and seek Him, when we delight ourselves in Him, he gives us the desires of our hearts.2
With this knowledge, I yearn for God’s will and not my own. My buggy self can’t comprehend it, but my spirit knows that I don’t have to succumb to Gregor’s slow spiral of depression, dehumanization, and death. In Him and by Him I will overcome my nature and adopt His. Goodbye bug, hello human.
“For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” 1 John 5:4-5 ESV
- Genesis 1:27 ESV
- Psalm 37:4 ESV
Here is a link to the article I read.