I've received so many blessings recently...
And in both of those interviews, I've been up front that this project is about confronting sin. To a degree it's been successful, and I still find myself struggling with the same long-term sins I had before I ever started the project.
I've heard it said that you can always tell that adults struggle with what they've dealt with since they were kids, and I suppose that's true.
I find myself thinking at the beginning of the day, "I won't do these things today." - I often do them less, but I also just as often screw up and do them all over again, as if the inner machinations of my mind and heart drive me toward them as some sort of cruel addiction. It is addiction, in its most literal sense with tobacco, but with other things as well. The Adamic nature is an addiction to sin.
This is how evil works its way in, staring us in the face and laughing at us. Humans are weak. These ancient evils know our ways, they know scripture, they know the most insidious formations of manipulation and oppression that they can employ against us, and we embrace it with a smile and deal with the guilt and nausea holding hands and walking together later.
Then we pray.
And every time, without fail, I sincerely repent. Some would say it can't be sincere if I fall back into these things (Tobacco, an unhealthy relationship with food, wrath, whatever it may be...) but it is. I resolve to work on them, and I do, but here's a pack of cigarettes staring me in the face, here's a drink I shouldn't have, here's me partaking in those two other activities as a result of something that made me mad today.
So the only thing I'm armed with to deal with them is prayer. I do this constantly, and still I fail.
God has given me everything, and made apparent to me this list of things I shouldn't do, and corrected me on many things I shouldn't have done.
So where's the difficulty? We are to lay these things at God's feet, and I always feel like I'm ready to do so and sincerely try to do it.
Then I light up another cigarette.
Or I have another drink.
Or I plot revenge (I never take revenge, but I plot it.)
Then I realize I've failed, and try to stop doing those things.
Thank God, he's not done dealing with me yet. Though sometimes, when I'm receiving a deluge of blessings, it still feels so far away. I am very thankful, I am sincere in my desire to give up unhealthy, damaging things.
These are the silent depths of existential dread, accompanied with hearing his call to action.
And where will that calling take me?
