God continues to reveal to me how my heart is deceitful and how, so often, it is me trying to excuse my sin and making it look like it is someone else’s fault. I hate owning up to my own sin, so I am constantly trying to make it look like I am good, but something else has failed. I seem to have become very adept at hiding my own inadequacies, or really, just ugly sin.
Historically my life has been a 3 steps forward and 2 steps back kind of life. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it. Good but not great. This is the language I have learned to use. What it looks like, often, is I am convicted of something I am not doing and I set a course to do better. After a few days, weeks, or months I often stop due to discouragement or, and here is my favorite, I “grow weary of doing good.” Now doesn’t that sound godly? See, I am good at hiding my sin.
This has happened a lot in mine and Mom’s marriage. I can’t tell you how many times I have made plans and efforts to treat her differently or love her better, and later stop due to discouragement or becoming weary. It has been a repeated pattern and it is defeating and after many times of this cycle, I just don’t have the motivation to keep on trying. Now I use language here like I do with myself. It dresses up my efforts, and myself in general, to make me feel better about myself and my failures. I mean, it is not like it is my fault I quit, I just get discouraged and become weary of fighting the brokenness of this world, right. See, I have taken the blame off of me, and really put it on mom, and made her the failure. Now, I would never voice this, even to myself, but it starts to create resentment as it shifts responsibility.
Maybe you already see the lie clearly, but I have lived so long in my deception that I only saw this recently. You see God cracked the door when he challenged me on why I quit and what was the motivation for loving Mom. My efforts to treat her as God calls me to, was failing because I would not get some satisfaction from this effort and therefore become discouraged or weary and quit. You see, this is just a crack God is opening, because this still puts the blame on Mom. She is not responding to my love as she should and therefore, she is the reason I grow weary.
Sometimes God can only reveal so much to me at a time or I get overwhelmed with my own sin. So months later I am continuing to be challenged with this, but not seeing my “wearyness” as my sin, which it really is. As I continued to see this and get to the root of the issue, I am discouraged because I am putting forth effort in a relationship and not getting back the “needed” or expected benefit to myself that I was wanting, and therefore quit.
What I am doing is an unspoken expectation of, I will do “x” if I get “y” in return. This is not love it is a transaction and is very much, “I will love you if …” This is hard to realize when I have spent my life believing that I just grow weary of doing good. That sounds SO much better than, I will love you only if you love me back the way I want you to. But wait, God is still not done.
When you get to the root of this transactional living, it is really just a form of manipulation. I do something in order for mom to do what I want her to do for me in return. And if she doesn’t, I will stop what I am doing for her. In the end, it is my effort to control the relationship and get out of it what I want, and when that fails, I punish her for not doing what I tried to get from her by withholding what I was doing to please her. When I put it like that, it is pretty ugly and a far cry from the lie of “growing weary of doing good.” The ugliness of my sin and my deceit is hard and one would think it would weigh me down and be discouraging.
As odd as it sounds, me realizing this and seeing my sin for what it is hasn’t been as hard as I would have thought., but really rather refreshing. I can’t really explain it, aside from “the truth shall set you free.” I have been lying to myself for so long to make myself feel better about my failures that seeing the truth has been like a breath of fresh air for me. The lies of the flesh are weighty and sin is defeating whether we realize we are sinning or not. Having God show me my sin and reminding me that, it too, is covered by His redemption has made it far easier for me to actually love Mom genuinely without the manipulation, but rather out of response to the love I have been shown by Jesus. Not that I am done with transactional manipulation, but Jesus is healing me from that and renewing my heart as He is faithful to do.
This is just one more letter to point you to Jesus, as He is the answer. He is good and loving and gracious and I encourage you to take your broken heart, your hurts, your wounds, your discouragement, and your wearyness to Him and he will reveal to you, at your pace, how He wants to make you more like Him as you passionately pursue a relationship with Him.
I love you,
Dad
Letters from a Fathers Heart 