Saturday, March 12, 2011

Excuses

I'm eating homemade chocolate chip pancakes with a banana strawberry sauce. Should have taken a picture, they were delicious. Today I am taking my sabbath instead of tomorrow because tomorrow will be really busy. This means no work today. But already I checked email. My excuse was I needed to get my Relentless Act of Justice devotion for the day. It's true, but it didn't mean I needed to open everything else as well. 
Of course as I read the devotional for today it was on obstacles. Obstacles that might come up as I walk through this Lenten season and asking myself how I will deal with the tension and discomfort that relentlessly acting on justice can inevitably bring.  I know exactly how I want dealt with them. Avoidance and excuses. I mean, who wants to deal with tension and discomfort when you can go get a massage to relive tension and prop yourself up with a comfy pillow to ease discomfort.  This has been my life. A life of mild excuses or fantasy to help me avoid the deeper discomfort and tension, but the last 6 months, or really the last year has made me look at my "need to avoid pain" and start to deal with it. I made a decision when I was in Canada that I needed to sit with pain, I needed to press in deeper and I needed to deal with the tension and discomfort of life. I wasn't always good at it. I often still made excuses. But I learned. I learned that going deeper and being real has a freedom. I learned that not having everything go my way is a gift from God. I have obstacles in my life, comforts that I don't like giving up that are popping up around every corner. It's easy to make excuses, but it's worth sitting in the tension and discomfort in order to learn all that God has for me. 
I may make it all 40 days of Lent and do every devotional and embrace every tension and discomfort that these devotionals bring my way. But more likely than not, I'll miss a day, choose comfort over discomfort and go get a massage to ease away the tension. However, I want to try. I want to press in. I want to learn and grow. I want God to draw me closer to him and into deeper intimacy with him. Jesus suffered, the poor suffer, who am I to avoid it. No more excuses...

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