It’s month 9 and I’m slipping. I’m failing. I’m growing tired of the structure, of the community, of the days. I’m losing the fight and the tenacity and I’m seeing Month-1 Samara creep through the seams. It’s humbling and embarrassing to learn that after 9 months of intensive community and growth you can still backslide at a moments notice.
That’s because the characteristics and skills I thought I was accumulating we’re actually characteristics of God all along. I wasn’t learning to be better; I was learning to submit to Him and to allow Him to show through me. I wasn’t making Samara more godly; I was lessening myself so that God would shine through. I want people to look at me and see Him.
Those characteristics, those skills, were never mine to begin with; they were always traces of Him. However, I grew proud. I thought I was acquiring this honorable skill set that I now permanently possessed, and could therefore conquer the world for His Kingdom with it. Yet now I find myself two months away from the end of this journey and I’ve seemingly lost everything I ‘acquired’.
The reality is I stopped calling on Him. I stopped asking Him to work through me, I stopped seeking Him out for guidance, I stopped calling on Him for help. I believed I had 9 months of serious practice, and I could now love anyone well at the drop of a hat. But I never actually loved anyone well, the Lord just helped me be humble enough so that He could love people well through me. I was never actually growing more generous, but the Lord had helped me humble myself so that He could show His generosity through me. I was never actually growing more patient and understanding, but He helped me humble myself so that He could demonstrate His peace and patience through me.
However, I lost sight of that, or truly never saw it in the first place. It was Him all along. The good people were seeing in me, was Him. I don’t possess godly characteristics, but my God dwells within me, and when I am able to truly humble myself as He asks, He is able to shine through me in tremendous capacities. It was never me, it was and always is Him. I can desire good, but I can’t do good. Only He can. I can train in His Word and in His Way all my life, but if I don’t wake up and choose to submit myself to Him every, single day, than all is lost.
“We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.”
(2 Corinthians 4:7)
“For I know nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of good is not.”
(Romans 7:18)
