On white-knuckles and trust issues...

God will be glorified in me regardless of how I live my life. Whether it be through His mercy or through His justice, my life will be a means through which He will show Himself.

And in the meantime, my failings as a Christian don't change that. Nor do they change the world. I am not that important and my failures and faults aren't surprises either. If I am a piece of a puzzle, I can't suddenly change shape. Even if I rip off the sticky outy bits or patch up the dents to either better myself or ruin myself, God will still find all the pieces, clean me up and make me fit.

And there's nothing I can do to change that.

And in the meantime, the things I do, the habits I fall into, the things I refuse to ask for help with, all affect my joy. They're all to my own detriment. They don't affect my relationship with God on His end. Because you know what? Even if I conquer all those things, all the things I perceive to be detrimental to my relationship with God, they are but the tip of the iceberg. And to believe that I will be able to somehow be good enough for God one day is to underestimate God's righteousness and undeservingly amplify my own.

Repent. I think that's what I'm having trouble with. Repenting without action is a meaningless admission of flaws. Repenting with action is behavior modification, which often leads to the replacing of one behavior with another, rather than absolving the need for the behavior to begin with. It also seems like a way to control your salvation. So where's the line between futile, self-important repentance and real repentance? Asking God for help? Asking God to remove whatever it is? Asking God to be more satisfying than the benefits of the behavior? Asking God to change your heart?

But what if that behavior pattern or lifestyle is the only facet of your life in which you have any sort of certainty at all? What if that is where you're comfortable and you don't want it to be removed? What if without it, life just doesn't seem worth it?

Obviously, there are a whole bunch of underlying issues there. But they're there regardless. This is the hand we've been dealt and in some ways, it's a bad one. In some ways, we need something to hold onto for fear that if we let go to merely hold onto God, we'll get dropped.

I'm the girl who, when my dad would carry me on his shoulders as a tiny child, would grip his hair so hard in an effort to keep myself from falling that he'd get a headache and lose handfuls of hair. Every time. God knows I can't let go. Not yet anyway. And I like to assume that He knows I would if I could and I wish I could.

And in the meantime, I guess all that's left is to pray that God might protect me and watch over me while I make my mistakes so that eventually, I might realize He's got a tighter grip on me than any grip my tiny white-knuckled fists could ever muster on their own.