Deliberate decisions and responsibility

Pardon me if this is a bit of a ramble, but I need to get my thoughts out where I can go over them later. Not having a laptop has seriously limited my abilities since July, but a new machine has re-opened the door for late-night trips to whatever coffee shop will have me.

There's no sense in leaving life up to chance.

Tonight's topic is semantics, more or less. Over the last few months, I've noticed myself referring to my past as "full of mistakes." And that's true, in part. I have made plenty of mistakes. I've gone into plenty of things with good intentions, only to have them come off the rails.

My problem with such thinking is that it takes blame for wrongdoing from my shoulders and puts it on chance. I tried to do the right thing, but simply got caught up.

But I think that's wrong. And I think that's poisonous.

Sure, I've made mistakes. But more often than not, they're not "mistakes." They're decisions. Bad decisions. Deliberately choosing the sinful option isn't a mistake, it's a conscious direction.

It's really interesting to watch kids disobey their parents and feign innocence. I remember doing it in elementary school, and pretending to have not understood the playground rules. If I claimed I was ignorant of the rule, I could get out of the punishment, right?

While that might have worked as a fourth grader in terms of actual consequences, but I'd bet money the playground attendant knew exactly what was going on. I was a handful not worth their time to deal with.

It's easy to scoff at the 10-year-old me now that I'm older, but it's also a little frustrating to realize I haven't broken the habit with age.

The "mistake" vs. decision confusion is the same years later  -- claiming you were misinformed or misguided, instead of admitting to having chosen to do the wrong thing with the full knowledge of what you were doing.

I can't help but wonder if my lack of responsibility for my actions has led to my inability to deal with and let go of things. That's been an issue of mine for as long as I can remember, dating back to that girl in high school or someone -- and I actually thought of this today -- telling me during my senior year that my shirt was too small.

Those things still rest on my mind from time to time. I'm not saying everything negative in my entire life is because of decisions I've made, but learning to take responsibility for the things I have done might allow me to figure out how to let go of hurtful things in my past.

Everybody makes mistakes. We're not perfect beings, and that seems to simply be part of life. BUT that doesn't absolve us -- absolve me -- of responsibility for the choices I make.

Maybe I just need to slow down a little bit. Maybe I just need to listen a little bit more. Maybe I just need to heed the things I hear when I listen. Maybe God has been laying the groundwork for a new way of thinking over the last few weeks with this continued theme.

Whatever happens going forward, I'm glad to be back on the blogging wagon.

Earth Downs: How hard I fight

Lately, the strongest thought on my heart has been my constant battle against sin. It seems like every moment is spent thinking about how to battle the next temptation or how to rid my daily life of things that can drag me down. I pour energy into walking a spiritual tightrope, as though to reach the other side unscathed.

What I wonder is this: Is that fight a lack of trust in God? Let me break that down.

For years, and much more consciously over the last few months, sin has been a struggle. When one thing appears conquered, another springs up to take it's place. The arrows of the evil one come from every direction, and no matter what defense I put up, no matter how hard I fight,  they eventually break me down. That's the thing, though. What defense *I* put up. How hard *I* fight. Where is God in this? Are my personal battles evidence that I don't put trust in God to carry me through trials and temptations? Should I have to frantically cry for a savior every time the enemy approaches me?

All those things can be addressed in one swoop. Why not, as I have talked about in previous posts, make every attempt to fill my heart with love for the Lord? When I push and fight sin out of my life, all it does is create a vacuum  that has to be filled with SOMEthing. More often than not that space is filled with more of what I just finished clearing out. If I work to fill my heart, mind and soul with Christ, then there is no room for anything else!

The concept is simple. The application is simple. The first steps are usually simple. The hard part is the follow through. For those friends that read and support me in the redemptive process, feel free to check in - both to share your own experiences, and to hold my feet to the fire in my quest.

Part 1 - The Wordless Bracelet

Rainbows?!? I wore it here, too.

A few weeks back, I was digging through the things in my closet, and I came across an old craft I had made years ago at summer camp. It was a bracelet, one composed of a thin leather strand strung with five colored beads - a wordless book that tells the story of our salvation.

Black represents the darkness brought on by our wallowing in sin and death. Red stands for the blood of Christ and the sacrifice that was paid. White shines for the pure and unadulterated FREEDOM from sin and death. Green is the growth and maturity, the process of our sanctification. Gold, the final color, is the golden streets of the Heaven, at the side of the Lord.

A small trinket with a big story, for sure, and definite connections to my past, the tender years spent at camp and the shaping of my life that took place there. After sitting for a few moments to reminisce, I slipped the band around my wrist and tied it in place without much thought.

Ignore the order. I do it how it want.

That small, thoughtless action would follow me around for the next week and a half. The bracelet stayed on, bouncing through my runs in the morning, dodging splatters of coffee at work, adorning my wrist on stage - even soaking along with me in the shower. It might seem a little silly for me to make a big deal out of a strange attachment to the bracelet, but it's much more than a physical object in my eyes.

To me, it has begun to serve as a reminder - I am to be shackled to the feet of Christ not matter where I am and what situation I am a part of. My connection to Christ is a source of strength - both against sin, as well as to spur my growth in the sanctification process. While it stayed there, I found that I could walk away from just about any situation, especially while I was alone.

After it had been on for a time, the bracelet became loose, and I chose to take it off for whatever reason. It hasn't been back on since, something that I plan to change once I arrive at home, but that brings me to an interesting point. The bracelet, the little physical trinket, made me realize how important it is to me to have a physical reminder of Christ's presence, sacrifice, love and dedication to the purity of my heart.

I need more of this.

To be continued...

Psalm 51:10 - The Fight of the Futile

I have a beard-growing habit something horrible.

Bad habits suck. They really do. They suck away the motivation to change, they suck the energy needed to fight them, and they suck at the life of their host. They're parasites, really, and like strong addictions they are extremely difficult to kick.

In my case, I form habits extremely easily. I go the same way to work each day. I usually get the exact same drink from Starbucks each time. I shower in the same order every morning, and have to sleep with the radio on at night. Most of these are innocuous, but there are habits that aren't so harmless. Those are the ones that I spend my time battling against - the pride, the lies, the undertow of lust - and for this post, I wanted to record some thoughts about the war that rages on a daily basis. 

I'd much rather have him fight alongside.

The first thought is wonderment at how often I have my eyes downward, focused on each individual skirmish. My initial reaction, should I react at all, is to pull into a shell and think "no no no no" like a child that refuses to listen. While that might work here and there, I gain nothing from it in the long run. I don't really learn anything, and the battle begins anew the next time around from exactly the same place I started from. How much better off would I be if, when attacked and tempted, I lifted my eyes UPWARD and allowed the Lord to guide me? What if I allowed God to show me the entire war - the victories that were being won and the surge of the host of heaven! No more hunkering down and bracing myself, but instead looking to the Lord for deliverance. How then would each battle look? 

The second thought is that running from sin doesn't help either. If I drift in and out of drugs (which I don't, for the record), and decide to get clean, simply changing where I live or who I hang out with will only help for a short period of time. Eventually, whether it's with the same crowd or a brand new one, my sinful nature will find a way back into whatever I was doing beforehand. What is required (thanks Anna and Josh) isn't a change of scenery, it's a change of heart. If the heart remains the same, why should the body change it's habits? Cleaning the fridge of beer, throwing out the dirty magazines, deleting that person's number - it serves only as a bandaid for an open wound. It will last for a time, but bleed through. I need to be made new - heart, mind and soul - in order for those changes to take effect. 

Those two things, that we should look to the Lord for deliverance and for a rebuilding of our hearts, brings new depth to one of my favorite verses:

"Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and renew a steadfast spirit in me." - Psalm 51:10