Income Tax
March 29, 2025
Renée Roden
Do you think of love as a tax you’re owed? (I do.)
Given to you as a reward? (I do.)
What is it that will make us so worthy of praise?
Discipline—such promptness, never late?
Or competency—spinning all the plates, keeping them twirling in the air?
Perhaps it’s always answering the phone, answering the door, the call from across the house: giving people what they need, following the rules, looking up and down the list of dos and checking all the boxes. Seeing the list of don’ts and feeling not an inch of fear. Knowing yourself on the right side of lovable, and happy there? Is that how I know I’m loved?
What about you is shameful?
Perhaps, like me, it’s your bad habits, hidden, alone, late at night, on your own.
Perhaps, like me, it’s your temper, the fights you pick.
The lack of routine: a hope to meet the deadlines and failing. Yes, I’ll go, Yes, I’ll help, Yes, I’ll come, but instead I’m on the couch watching Netflix.
Perhaps it’s that choking feeling of envy, scrolling through the internet, flipping through better pictures.
It’s your depression, your anxiety, it’s whatever unmedicated thing that plagues you.
But what if these were the very things that made you loved?
What if the pieces of yourself that are most unacceptable, ugly, and in need of saving that are the places where love can reach you?
Perhaps our blemishes are the thin places, where the veil between heaven and earth is very thin. The divine can see you there Perhaps in those places where you can’t hide from yourself, say you don’t need a savior—can’t protest that you can do it on your own—that’s where the Creator, the one who made you, the author of your beginning, who lives inside the shape of your own life—meets you and takes your hand.
What is a frustration or anxiety you are bringing to God today?
Who is someone you can extend compassion—a kind word, a text, a quick hug—toward today?
Renée Roden is the author of the forthcoming “Tantur: Seeking Christian Unity in a Divided City” with Liturgical Press. You can learn more about her work at reneedarlineroden.com and read her writing on Substack at Sweet Unrest.
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