This week I've kind of been praying for God to show me what I'm doing wrong. I know that I sin all the time, but often I'm so blind to it, I don't even realize it. Since New Years, one thing has been popping into my head. With the new year, everyone asks each other what their New Years Resolutions will be. I've been telling people that I don't make them, mainly because I don't feel bad when I break them. Most people laugh when I tell them that. It (was) the truth. The reaction I got from a random guy at church the other day was "well that's a cop out". I never thought of it like that.
In my Bible study for community group this week there's a quote from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It says,
"Perfect chastity (purity)...will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again...We learn, on the one hand that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other hand, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection."
Woh. It's like God is slapping me in the face. I spent all of high school and college not really caring about anything - grades didn't phase me at all. There's a small part of me that really wanted to get A's, but if I actually tried and didn't get them, it was too disappointing. I haven't taken my job search seriously because it hurts when I get turned down. I've used my temp job as a crutch and it's been preventing me from growing up and looking for a real job. I've been protecting myself from...myself. From not allowing myself to feel excited or nervous, because if something didn't turn out the way I wanted, I guess subconsciously I wasn't sure I could take it.
While I don't see myself as a controlling person, maybe this is the way I control things. I lower my expectations and don't expect much from God. What a crock I have believed for almost a decade!!!
How can I believe in such an great and powerful God and then not expect Him to work amazing wonders in my life?
By protecting myself, I've been preventing myself from living - from feeling the pain of disappointment from myself, which is the very thing I need to feel so that I can ask forgiveness and pick myself up again.
I read recently that the greatest sin is independence. I'd like to add apathy to that list. To think all these years I've thought apathy was just a part of my personality.
I am so sorry. For myself and for my relationships with others.
Philippians 3: 12-16
12Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
15All of us who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you. 16Only let us live up to what we have already attained.
