On Failing... Again...

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
Inever had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through;
I want God, you, all my friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin;
I talk of love--a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
~CS Lewis

Lately I’ve been continuously reminded of my own sinfulness. And there is a lot of it. These past few weeks for me have been overloaded with stress—spiritual, physical, mental. I broke once; scared all my teachers and half my classmates. I often allow myself to get overwhelmed, and I’ve been realizing more and more lately why that is. I just don’t trust God enough. Still. Of course that sounds a little trite, but here’s what I mean; I keep trying to do things on my own strength. I’ve been reading Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, and chapter by chapter, I am consistently awed by his frank honesty and willingness to admit things I will rarely, if ever, own up to. I’ve been needing a good hit in the head from a “spiritual 2x4” lately (that’s what we called it in youth group growing up), and I just got a few good ones. My heart has been so raw lately with all the stress from school and some potentially scary test results from my doctor (everything’s fine, btw), I see God is using all that inner turmoil to churn up my heart like tilled soil. I hope. All these scars and ugly blemishes on my life that I’ve allowed to fester unchecked… I hope to be rid of them. Watch me try to do it on my own once again. Watch me as I cry out to God briefly, and then turn to my own strength to try and heal myself. I wonder why I love so much to give to others and do things for others, but I never allow them to serve me. “You want me to help you with that?” “No thanks,” I say, obviously struggling, “I got it.” Not that I don’t want the person to help me, I just don’t want them to inconvenience their own life for me. I don’t want them to waste their energy. I do that with God. A lot. I know my problems aren’t as big as some people’s, I know the things I complain about often prove my gold shoes are too tight. But God still longs to help me carry my burdens, to teach me to give them up to him because he is way stronger than me. But still I insist on carrying them myself, because I feel like he ought to have bigger fish to fry. Like I'm not worth the trouble. When I try to do everything myself, I miss out on letting go of the struggle. When my heart struggles, I get stressed, and I don’t allow the peace of the Holy Spirit to calm my heart. I want my heart calm, so that I can reach out to others and allow that calm and love to flow into their lives. On my own strength, I feel a dam blocking anything flowing out of me. I feel my heart closed off to others, and I get snappy and selfish. In my busy-ness and stress, I let go of relationships and hurt people. I wallow in my own brokenness, walking around in my own open shackles like a fool. I learn of new mistakes, and I beat myself up for them, but I don’t turn to him and his grace. I won’t allow myself to accept it. Accepting it means I’ve failed, and I hate admitting failure. Just ask my teachers. They’ve been trying to cure me of my perfectionism from day 1. I seem to have poisoned myself thoroughly with the American notion of hard work and self-reliance. If I could just pull myself up by my bootstraps, I’d be ok. Such a lie. To borrow a concept from another writer whose name escapes me: without Christ, I would have neither boots, nor straps on which to pull. I wish I could write some sort of resolution at the end of this, but I have nothing. I have only myself, looking to what lies ahead, hoping that I will finally allow Christ to truly be center of my life. I want to stop doing this myself, because it is obvious that I can’t.