Sigh.
That's pretty much it!
I started this post resigned to two days of failure, but the day is not over yet! So I will turn this into just one day of failure by reading the Bible and praying before I go to bed tonight.
It's been an introspective week. I've been writing down a list of all the different expectations I have for myself. It's exhausting, and the list is not even exhaustive yet. (See what I did there? Good one.) Tonight I'll be reading a passage from Jeremiah, as part of my homework assignment. I'll report on this maybe tomorrow, but I'll be reading it with this question in mind: How are my expectations of myself offensive to God?
Good question. It's not something I ever thought about as being offensive to my Lord. Sometimes I think the word 'sin' is even a euphemism; it's a word that, in Reformed circles, we are very comfortable with. We're sometimes proud to be able to call sin, sin. But to say that my high personal expectations are actually offensive to God? Well, that sheds it in a different light for me. It's pretty heavy, and I've been avoiding this task. I'm afraid of...what, exactly?
Okay, I'm afraid of being sanctified. For real. Recognizing my offences against a holy God for what they are requires me to change for the better. It requires me to be transformed! I'm scared of that. What will I look like? Obviously, the Bible tells me I will look more like Jesus, which is awesome, and deep down what I really want, so why am I so scared?
It's like I'm trying to convince myself to let go of my old self, but it's just these tattered little pieces that I'm clinging to like my old security blanket. I cried about losing that blanket when I was ten, but managed to do fine without it the next night. And God is sending me all these troubles to show me that my old self, my old life, is junk and I don't need it. I need Him, not this crappy security blanket that just causes me heaps of misery.
I think this is part of why I haven't been dedicated to Bible reading and prayer. I'm avoiding some of the things that will sanctify me. How messed up is that? By committing to a year in the Word, I'm opening myself up to mega conviction about the sins in my life, and mega transformation into a child of God who actually bears more than a passing resemblance to her Dad. Overcoming this fear that I recently identified is a big part of what I'm doing in this project.
More on this another time, I think, after I've sorted through some of it. I'm still ruminating on my expectations and what they actually mean. I think this is going to be epic. (In the proper figurative sense as a 'task of great magnitude', not the hyperbolic sense that the kids use these days.) Pray for me!
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