Big Girl Shoes

I  am not very good at discipline, especially when it comes to my spiritual life. My whole life (spiritually speaking) has been a roller coaster of ups and downs, spiritual highs and lows, days of faithful scripture-reading and prayer followed by weeks of spiritual blandness, etc. Now, I know that everyone experiences times of plenty and times of drought. But I get particularly discouraged by the seemingly endless cycle of, “Wow, God is so good, I want to read my Bible all day long…(a few days later)…I don’t have time for a quiet time…(a few days later)…I’d rather watch a movie than read my Bible…(a few weeks later)…*vowing to do better a better job at putting the Lord first*…Wow, God is so good…etc.” Have any of you ever experienced this cycle?

Something kind of crucial that I left out of that cycle happens during what I will call the “conviction phase.” Before the cycle starts again, I realize what I’ve done and come to a place somewhere between guilt, despair, and shame. I find myself wallowing in a false sense of self-pity: self-pity because I feel like I have a long ways to go to get back in “good favor” with God, and false because that’s not even remotely true. It isn’t, is it? If it was, Christianity would be built on works, not on grace and faith—there’s no such thing as “earning” God’s favor by doing all the right things. And yet this cycle continues to happen to a nauseating degree. I wage a silent and destructive war within myself, going back and forth between times of conflict and times of peace, fighting over priorities and trying to believe what I know to be true about grace, all the while simply stepping aside and letting Satan feed me lies and send me into despair. And I’m sick of this!

A little while back, when we were still in Bulgaria, I was having one of my self-pity moments. Although Tyler and I had been trying to hold each other accountable to reading scripture and praying regularly, there was something about my heart that didn’t feel in the right place. I was nervous about India, and I wanted to fill my free time with mind-numbing things like movies and fiction books, so whenever I did open my Bible, it was simply for the sake of doing it. But instead of spending more time in prayer and worship with the Lord to ask him to rectify my heart, I felt sorry for myself for not doing a better job and chose to blubber and cry about how horrible I was, how disappointed God must be with me, how I’ll never be as good of a Christian as some other people. And you know what Tyler did? Instead of comforting me and letting me cry it out, he stepped up and led me like I needed to be led. He refused to let me wallow in self-pity and allow sin to keep me in the pit. Yes, I got a heavy dose of “tough love” from the husband that day. He basically told me to put on my big girl shoes and do something about this stupid cycle—I’m doing nothing for myself or for Christ when I stay in the ring with Satan (and just to clarify, he went about this in a comforting and loving way…God just gave him the wisdom to see beyond my emotions and give the constructive criticism I needed to hear. What a leader!).

Let me throw a little bit of scripture at you: 2 Corinthians 7:9-11 says, “Yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance…Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. See what this godly sorry has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done.” So what is this “godly sorrow” Paul speaks of? When people think of something that is “worldly,” they think of lust, corruption, greed, etc. But I think it’s important to note that anything that does not further the kingdom of God is worldly.  The Lord wants us to feel conviction; it’s one of the reasons why He gave us the Holy Spirit. If we never felt conviction, how would Jesus shape us to be more like Him? But here is where many people (including myself) mess up: we feel conviction for something we already knew we were doing wrong (be it a secret sin or simply having priorities backwards), and then we feel horrible about it and let guilt and self-pity take over to spiral down into a place where there is no progress. This is worldly sorrow. What God intended for us to do with conviction was feel the Holy Spirit’s prompting, repent, and do something to correct it. There is no room for the stagnancy that comes about from simply feeling guilty about “failing” God. We must take action! Nothing will ever change if we go round after round with worldly sorrow in a dangerous cycle that, as Paul says, leads to death. But godly sorrow leads to salvation! Salvation from death itself, salvation from a particular sin, from self-pity, from selfishness, from all things that bring pain. And it leaves no regret. Doesn’t that sound worth trying?