For Every Again and Again

I can't the whisper deepens, sinking into the soft and tender flesh of the mind, the persistent pump of the heart coursing responses everywhere and nowhere new.

Whether subconscious fears, unfaceable feelings, suffocating circumstances, or daring to dream, those two words have followed me through many years. 

Beginnings didn't have strong enough roots. Endings didn't clean up nice.  

You can obey, you just don't want to, I can still hear my older siblings say, as I glared with such laughable stubbornness it's a wonder I'm still alive. 

"But remember this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power" II Timothy 3:1-5a 

That list really hurts. Literally. Those sins are still tempting the flesh, opposing the Spirit of God. And I feel the death. I feel the tearing and the ripping and the slashes as the sword of the Word of God divides bone and marrow, sometimes with anesthetics and sometimes not. 

What about the last bit: "holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power?" That's the place I chose for so long. 

When faced with a place where I just "couldn't" measure up to the law of God, the law of culture, my peers, or even just the  vacuum ability to suck it up and obey my parents willingly, I made my own laws. I grew up making standards that I could keep in my own power. It conveniently fed into my desire to control, and to win. 

But because of it, I just looked godly to the eyes watching our homeschool family, or that person who I served doing x+2y+17A. 

Obedience was still foreign. So God sent Grace and Surrender and Pain instead. They still speak a foreign tongue; but they're omni-lingual, to it's OK.  

They're teaching me that I really can't. And that's a good thing. Because: 

Love covers a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8b 

And I've got the biggest love in all creation beating through that same heart. The same one that wants to betray me with sweet death, one sin at a time, with each dying beat that will never come back. 

It's this leverage that I will join my Lover's words with new breath, 

"[His] grace is sufficient for [us], 

for power is perfected in weakness." 

2 Corinthians 12:9