Jay never emailed me to go to bible study, I dunno if that was a failure to correctly present the bible or not, I fail in doing well in school, I fail in working as hard as I can at work, I fail my friends, I fail my brother, I fail guitar, I fail learning any language, I fail engineering, I fail serving, I fail loving, I fail being joyful, I fail working out, I fail being financially responsible, I fail being as clean as I want to be, I fail being intentional, I fail to make time, I fail to be held accountable, I fail to keep those I love accountable, I fail God, I fail my saviour, I fail...
I don't understand God's love because I don't know how He could sacrifice anything, let alone His son for me when I just continue to fail in everything. I myself have a hard time loving brothers and sisters who don't sin against me, and an even harder, almost impossible time loving those that do.
Lately, I've been reflecting on the fruits of the Spirit a lot. I need to work on being more loving, more joyful, more peaceful, more patient, kinder, good, faithful, gentle, and self controlled. When I fail at these I can't accept myself as just a sinner. I need to be a sinner striving for righteousness. Knowing that I fail can't be an excuse to fail or a simple write off of why I failed. I fail because I lack Godly attributes. A good question I heard is; if the Spirit works in us to grow us then what good will it do to pursue the fruits of the Spirit when they are resulting from the Spirit, not ourselves. Answer? I dunno haha. I don't know how the Spirit works, maybe the Spirit plants conviction in our hearts or something like that. The Spirit prays for us but we still need to pray ourselves. I think that likewise we can just absolve our responsibility to growth in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I won't accept failure.
I'm not as strong as people think, and even if people don't think I'm that strong, I'm still probably less than that. But my failures won't defeat me. I pray that my failures will decrease or even be non-existant but until then I'll continue to strive, sometimes joyfully, sometimes with feet dragging. To give up would be to fail again.
An email from my prof
Hi Andrew, I thought your extemporaneous speech from last Tuesday evening was well chosen, relevant and valuable. It is not often easy to express these ideas to groups of people (as opposed to a one-on-one discussion). I respect your conviction to your beliefs. Jeff
Seed planted (I hope) ^_^
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