What Next, God?

There’s no doubt about it: temptation is easier to fight when you are healthy. Proper nutrition, exercise, sleep and just generally not sick help me when I battle.

So it’s no surprise that 3 hours of sleep last night has put me on the down side of temptation. I gave into something I thought I licked.

I cannot feel self-hatred, only bitterly disappointed because this is my Achilles Heel, and it means that God is far from me now.

What is the length of time, I always wonder, before I can ask for forgiveness and beg mercy? I had opportunities during the temptation period to resist, to pull, to not go as far as I did. My prayers for help did not go unanswered, only my response to rise above and STOP lacked. I feel remorse and disgust at my actions, but I don’t feel worthy as yet of even asking forgiveness when it was so deliberate.

It’s like addiction, only if the alcoholic were learned cured. What I really need is a spiritual partner. My own partner shot down the idea that I could conceivably lick this sin this weekend and that little devil has been sitting on my shoulder ever since.

Given that sleep is not an option right now (my little one is having to hard a time sleeping), then that must mean that I am strong enough to defeat temptation even at its most difficult point: when my body is suffering fatigue.

We fall, we get up, we try again, but sometimes we can’t – or shouldn’t – get up to fast. To wallow in our fallenness is to feel the sting of our incorrect actions. Suffering, not for the sake of suffering, but to learn our lesson better and better this time.

This road is difficult but someday, somehow I shall overcome, with God’s grace.

If you’ve been reading my Mom-Blog, you’ll know that my family has been extremely ill the last few weeks. Viruses, ear infections, sinus attacks and pinkeye have run rampant between my husband, my 2 kids, and me. Well, I think I’ve mentioned before that my own personal sin and temptation attacks most strongly when I am sick. I’m sure that part of that has to do with being weaker of will when we don’t feel good.

At any rate, I went for several days in a row of excruciating pain, plus body aches, sore throat, and runny nose. I managed to avoid my sin for a while, but I didn’t think I had enough willpower for much more illness. So when I started to think the pain was receding, I got pinkeye. (The kids had it forever without me getting it, so it was weird.) That was only uncomfortable for one day, and the following day I felt much better – weak, but better. That night I got attacked by sinus allergies, painful ones. My temptation was not over, it seemed.

In fact, I got these horrible attacks for the next few nights. It occurred to me, at some point, that these were not exactly attacks but more like tests – a la Job. I had gone through a week of illness and fought the temptations with worship – even through my pain – and they were not done yet. I felt as if the devil were somewhere going, “God, one more day – one more night – she’ll fall, you’ll see!” In thinking that, it gave me more courage to try and succeed.

I’m happy to say that I pulled it out. In fact the last time I considered my temptation it had barely any attraction at all.

You may think this is no biggie, but for me, it is. It’s something I’ve been battling since my youth and to me, that is an awesome victory. But it’s not mine, it’s God’s. He helped me pull this out. It was His Voice in the back of my head, night after night, saying (softly) we can we this, you and I. Hang in there.

I hope I don’t get tested for a while but I’m a realist and I know that to stay on this path accurately, more tests need to come. I will take them as they rise.

It’s not something everyone wants to talk about, but an in-depth look at sin and some of the roads to it are on my mind tonight.

YOUR GREATEST SIN
To be frank, it’s been on my mind for a while because a recent series of events led me to my sin. I believe that while all sin is wrong, to be sure, everyone has their own greatest sin. By “greatest” here I mean the one you’re most likely to give in to, the one you struggle with the most, the one that you have to put on all KINDS of armor to protect yourself against. For example, an alcoholic’s greatest sin, most likely, is drinking. (I say most likely because perhaps that alcoholic is, for example, a hitman. Then I wouldn’t think that drinking is his greatest sin.) By “greatest” here I mean the one you’re most likely to give in to, the one you struggle with the most, the one that you have to put on all KINDS of armor to protect yourself against.  (My sin will remained unnamed. Perhaps when I am healed of it, I will be able to speak of it and help others, but I’m not there yet.)

THREE D’s THAT LEAD TO SIN
While reading “Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World” in 05, I learned the three “d’s” that lead to sin: distraction, discouragement, and doubt, in that order. So let’s cut back to the week before Mother’s day. I was, as usual, distracted – I was working on a project that I had no faith in myself to handle, and the kids were a bit out of control. A family member was required to babysit while I worked.  She lets them do whatever and the girls take advantage and go wild. When I was with them – which was frequently to babysit my babysitter – my mind was on work, and at work my mind was on them. I probably should have had God front and center but I didn’t.

I began to get discouraged about the kids and my parenting. The work I muddled through and accomplished what I needed, but in my really important work, motherhood, my confidence went completely out the window. Their misbehaviour spilled out of the house and I began to feel humiliation and failure as a mom. Perhaps this was fueled by the looming Mother’s day and by visiting my mom (feeling like I failed as a faithful daughter) and a few home catastrophies. This mounted all week so that by Friday, I had complete doubt in my entire ability to be a good person AT ALL.

SIN STEPPED IN
And in that space of doubt, in stepped temptation and out went my will power. The sin was with me for 2 days and I was immersed so deep that I did not know how to climb out. When at last I did, I wasn’t ever sure that my apology could be accepted by God, because I had thought of Him in the midst of it all and didn’t know how to turn back.

Sunday’s sermon was helpful – about how God creates nothing bad, only good, only we can be shaped and reshaped over and over by God into something good AGAIN.

LOOPHOLE OF FORGIVENESS
I’m still having echoes of my sin, so I don’t know if I accomplished anything quite like repentence. In “What’s so amazing about grace”, Yancey talks about the loopholes – loopholes that initially helped drive me away FROM Christianity – about how we can do anything and THINK we will be forgiven in advance.

I’m not saying sin is planned, necessarily, all the time, but sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s ongoing and you just don’t know WHERE to draw the line of forgiveness. And Christianity is all about receiving grace and how ONLY grace can save, but I feel like there’s something missing to the puzzle, that your sin (back to the one sin that personally plagues us) has to be conquered absolutely and without that true repentence cannot be reached.

I don’t know where I go from here. I often wonder if therapy can help me find a way through my sin because it is born of all the ugly things inside me, and none of the good things that I am as a creation of God.  I often wonder how to navigate the stormy sea of sin without drowning because it does seem to me that sin brings you down into a vacuum you cannot see or hear in.  It’s your responsibility for putting yourself there, but what is the RIGHT course of action to get yourself ALL the way out?