To Grips

Do you ever find that you just can't seem to get it right no matter how hard you try? Have you ever thought to yourself,"I just want to give up!" Well, you are not the only one. Now, I'm not talking about things like: a great bowling game, fixing your car, or even solving that problem in your relationship you just can't seem to understand. No, what I am talking about are things of the heart, deeper things; trying to understand and to be more of what we are called to be. I'm a talking about trying to be more like Jesus. Having the heart of Christ is quite possibly the most difficult task I have ever encountered. Since it is the one thing that matters the most to me, I push myself to try extra hard. And yet still, I seem to always find myself failing even harder. "Why is this?", I ask. Why, when in all my prayers and petitions, I seem to always fall short? I think all of us who are truly trying to be disciples of Christ ask ourselves this question almost daily, if not weekly.
As a friend told me on the walk home from Spanish class today,"This is not a bad question to ask, it means you are actually trying. Maybe you just have to come to grips with the way things are and move on. You are not going to get it right the first time you know. How many times did the apostles themselves and even Paul have to mess up before they got it right just once?" Even then they still didn't admit that they never made a poor decision again.
We may not want to admit it sometimes but, unfortunately, we are powerless to change the past. We simply have to trust that God can use our mistakes, and move on to forgiving ourselves, which is, at times, the hardest thing to do. I mean, how can we move on to anything else, like loving and forgiving others, if we can't even do that for ourselves. I have the hardest time with this.
So really, in the end, asking God to intervene and make everything pretty again is not a "pretty" process. It actually was a heart breaking, bloody, and passionate process that He started just about 2,000 years ago. So, becoming more like Christ, being more conformed to His image, from what I have seen and experienced, is a lot of prayer yes, but it is also a lot of coming to grips with the fact that it is going to hurt and we will fail and we must move on. Strength, endurance, patience, humility, and all those things that we desire to have from life, comes at a price, just like that perfect bowling game, fixing that car, and solving that problem in the relationship. That is what I see In the Heart of the Lion.