No matter how much I try to forget
It always comes back
Haunting me
Stalking me
Hanging on to my heart
I thought I could just let go
What a stupid thought
The struggle
The desire
My sinful art
Oh Lord let me trust
In you find rest
Father take me! Carry me away!
Awaiting the dawn of your new day
(March 2002)
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Pounding. Pounding. Drowning, drowning.
The guilt and shame attack. Pounding. Pounding.
I loose my grip and fall in to sin. I’m drowning, drowning.
Like a cycle. Pounding -drowning-pounding-drowning.
again and again. it never seems to end.
the cycles of my sin.
And now, more than ever, I find myself alone.
(April 21, 2008 )
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How often do we find ourselves caught in whirlpool of sin? For those of us who are crossing over to the life of Christ in radical ways, sometimes the walk seems impossible. I know for me it has…many times. There were times when I expected my struggles to just disappear. I thought that if God didn’t take away my hurts and my pains and my sins when I wanted him to then maybe he had forgotten me…or maybe he decided that He didn’t want me as His Child after all. Even as a Christian I have fallen to what I would have considered “big sins”. Sometimes I did them out of habit, sometimes it was out of unbelief, sometimes it was outright rebellion. There were times when I didn’t know if I should even try to be the Christian I wanted to be; if God isn’t going to change me…then why should I keep trying…apparently I’m not that good at it to begin with!!
The thing about all these thoughts were that I didn’t see or realize anything beyond what I thought should happen. I didn’t realize that God isn’t bound by the same sense of time that we are here on earth. I didn’t realize that while the end result was for Him, the journey, in many ways, is for me – to believe, to see, and to begin to understand the Lord I supposedly had started following. In some distorted, crazy, God like way, He has used every one of those big as-a-Christian-failures to reveal to me just how much I am loved. It wasn’t in the cheery, jumpy, happy Christian worship/fellowship/life that I experienced the most serious inside-out growth…it was those pits that I kept running back to…the ones that God was so lovingly trying to free me from (and in many ways, still is).
So many of us, I fear begin following Jesus with a pseudo-false idea that transformation happens overnight. In some areas we may experience Damascus road, 180 degree transformations, but in MOST areas of our life we will experience transformation that happens over months, years, and perhaps even a lifetime. Sanctification (the process by which we are restored in the eyes of God) is a lifelong process and is only finally and fully completed on God’s side of heaven. Until then we walk, we crawl, and sometimes we are carried along this journey. Some times we may take 3 steps forward and then 10 steps back the other way. We may stop at what seems like a standstill. We may feel turned around and upside down. And at other times we feel like we are moving full speed ahead. Through all of this, we will quite often focus on how we’re moving along. On the other hand, God, I believe, remains focused on what we’re moving toward – either toward him, or away from him. The direction must be one that is cumulative – overshadowing any failures or sins we may have along the way. With our hearts repentant and fighting for Him, we can be moving in the right direction…even if we don’t feel like we are today.
We are so bound by time that we tend to see life and progress in the pieces that we experience in this minute or in the next. God, on the other hand, is not bound by time in the same way…nor is he concerned with time as we are (after all, He is the author of time). I have a feeling that God is like a visionary who looks at the big picture. Think of it as a movie. We focus on one scene or the next, but God looks at the combination of a hundred scenes put together. He sees the movie not as a single scene, but as all and everything put together…He sees and works towards the whole…and His finished product is nothing shy of beautiful!! I’m sure he is disappointed to some degree in our failures, but He’s already given us His Son so that those failures are unable to have a power that can stop or interrupt the bigger work he is doing in our lives. Actually, they can’t stop it. We can stop it if we start believing the lies that are sins are in fact bigger than the work that God Himself did on the cross (I would say that we can not out sin God’s ability, love, and Grace).
The truth is that the Lord is a God of restoration, and desires to complete the work he has started in each of us individually (Philippians 1:6). When we embrace and believe God, we are thrown onto a trajectory that is headed in one direction…and that direction is one that leads us back to what God intended with creation, before the fall. It starts the day you say “I do” to God…and Ends when you see him face to face in heaven. We may be caught up by how bad we’ve messed up today, but I know that with our eyes focused on Christ…we may very soon realize that even with all those stumbles and falls God has brought us farther than we ever thought we could go.
Don’t ever believe the lies that you’ve sinned too much for God…and don’t ever believe that you can mess up too much as a Christian. It might be a slow, difficult process…and there may be a few more failures along the way, but the end result is in the hands of God. If He can create the beautiful mountains, a colorful sunset, and all that is around us, how can we not believe in His ability to make something amazing from the mess we’ve made of our lives?
