I always want to write something important and moving.
I'd love to be the heroine of my own story.
I'm not.
I'm face to face with my fallenness. The last 21 months of my life have been objectively awful. Intense suffering has dredged up sin and I find my life is full of broken behaviors. I recently joined our church's STEPS program (a gospel centered addiction recovery program that also welcomes people struggling with the enslaving powers of sin in general) thinking maybe I could get my behaviors under control. We hadn't even officially started the program when God kindly pointed out through a prep lesson and Jeremiah that the problem isn't my behaviors, it's my heart. The Biblical concept of a heart is the seat and source of human will and emotion and thought. All a person's life flows out from it. My broken behaviors flow out of a sick heart.
I need Jesus to heal my heart. He's the hero of the story. And not just mine.
I'd also love to say I've weathered all my difficulties well. I have absolutely not. I sometimes am angry at God and struggle to draw near to him in any way but yelling and blaming him. I sometimes seek earthly distractions and entertainments over him. I sometimes forget him. While I have confidence that God will preserve my soul through death, I sometimes despair of having any more good come to me in this life. I struggle to sense him at work and to take His word to heart and take comfort in it.
A few days ago I was in a dark mood and full of dark thoughts, weighed by many cares. Then today, it came to me that I know God, and am known by Him, and He loves me and I love Him. And I rejoiced, for in that moment I knew I had what matters most in life.
"And this was the lesson of my suffering, not that I had held on well to my Savior, but that he had faithfully and perfectly held me."
