“For the death he [Jesus] died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” -Romans 6:10-11
When I finally let God break me all the way, I saw nothing but the ground. Face to face with all my weakness in the dirt that was my own shame, all the brokenness I tried to conceal with my empty smile and glamour entirely revealed, I was relieved to be defeated.
I was relieved to be fully convinced that I am still in need of Him. I am still nothing without Him, and nothing in the world that I have found has been able to satisfy that in me.
I’d done a good job so far of victimizing myself. I began separating myself from God a long time ago, with each day I spent away from Him telling myself I didn’t know how to be near Him. It started with the notion that I could just quit listening for a while, until it go to the point that I couldn’t remember how to hear Him anymore. And I liked the way my thoughts sounded better. And I didn’t like that I didn’t look like everyone else in the world anyway. And I let myself fall out of love with God—because I traded Him for the world. All along I’d been imagining God standing with His back to me as each attempt to be more glorious than Him, each selfish thought, each night, each drink, each kiss, made me more numb. I imagined wrong, though.
Because I turned my back on Him before any of that happened. I let myself fall for the world – that looked so pretty, so enticing, so easy- and I broke His heart in the midst. And when I got to the inside (of the world), it wasn’t beautiful at all. It was disgusting. It was filled with .. nothing, absolutely nothing that I was looking for. It was ugly. And I was ugly for my attachment to it.
In the shame of all I’ve let myself sell into, I didn’t want to face Him. There is truth to the fact that I’m not good enough to do so. He is so good; and I am nothing in comparison to that. But the point of the cross wasn’t only death, but counteractively to the death of sin, life in Christ. He died for redemption. He died to free. I don’t have to stand before Him with just my flesh; if that were the case, then I wouldn’t be able to. I can stand before Him with the cross, though. With full confidence that Jesus has interceded for me. That his death wasn’t for nothing, but for everything that I’m fighting for now.
I am doing my best to allow my heart to be emptied of all my greed for things, and rather let it cling to Him in the process. I am falling back in love with who He is, because I am seeing how great His love is for me. How long He’s been standing there for me, just waiting for me to turn around. How nothing I’ve done has made Him any less of what He is. How He can stay so faithful to a daughter that has been nothing but faithless.
No comments:
Post a Comment