growing up, not out...

I’m struggling here to wrap my mind, heart, & soul around some things. I have financial problems, weight problems, & emotional problems but they all seem to come from the same place inside myself. There is just all of this angst inside me. That was supposed to stop after high school wasn’t it? In some ways I feel like I haven’t grown beyond those years. Oh yea I’ve gotten better at pretending like I assume everyone else does. Most days I can even convince myself that I’m fine and that nothing is wrong or out of place. But there is this scared shitless kid inside me who is afraid of being found out. I’m a mass of paradoxes. At one moment I believe that I am a failure and can not ever succeed and then in the next breath I judge others as less than me. Why do I do this? Why can’t I ever seem to get to the middle ground? Why can’t I realize I’m not a worthless idiot but I’m not amazingly outstanding either. It is just this battle inside me that keeps me in a sort of stasis, unable to change and unable to move forward toward any sort of resolution in my life. On top of it add my faith in God, in the cleansing power of Jesus in my life. Again on one hand I get brief glimpses of who I really am in God’s eyes as his child but then I come back to the fact that I am not living for him. Not walking the walk the way I know the Bible says I should be. I don’t feel like a new creation most of the time and even when I do feel that way for a short period it is quickly vanquished as soon as I open my mouth, or succumb to one of my myriad of weaknesses.
Now before you wonder if I am just being over dramatic I must admit that my weaknesses are not just run of the mill weaknesses. They are the kind of weaknesses that would get me thrown out of any ministry in even fairly open minded churches. In the case of a lot of churches I would likely be thrown out of the church body altogether. I’m not a murderer in action or a rapist in action but there is a great darkness in my heart and thoughts. I do commit real sin on a regular basis as well. I lie, cheat, swear, relapse into drug use and succumb to pornography. There is a song by the 77’s that comes to mind “…The lust, the flesh, the eyes, & the pride of life drain the life right out of me…” Or another by Mike Roe from the Lost Dogs “…Paid all my money and what did I get, left here to smolder like some cigarette. I smoked every pack of lies made yet. I never read the little warning that said I’d be an eternal soul with an eternal crave…”
Now I know God has forgiven me but I struggle with getting any sort of peace for more that brief periods of time. How could this happen, how did I get here? Through a long series of failures and defeats mostly at my own hands. I am not a victim of some evil person or group. Sure I understand that I am in a war with the devil and can even intellectually understand that God has already defeated him and claimed me as his own. So why can I not get the victory? I long for change, I long to be the guy standing up living the true Christian life, being bold and uncompromising. But in reality I doubt that many people I encounter in my life even know I’m a Christian at all. I mean sure I’m involved in a ministry at my church and I put on the Christian face to those people, but even then I think they know I’m just really a surface, not really walking the walk. What’s worse is that there have been several times in my life that I have felt God calling me to something and I have willfully closed the door on those things out fear and out of the knowledge of my lack.
I understand that the point is that God uses the weak sinner to give himself even more glory, but I just can’t imagine the next step for myself if I were to move towards one of those open doors into the calling of God on my life. Now I’m sure anyone who reads this will think, man he is whacked and pathetic and way overdoing it and you may be right. But why can I not rise out of this and allow God to change me and mold me into what he wants? It is the knowledge of my closing those doors and of my constant failures that keeps me paralyzed to move on to grow. I just saw a bumper sticker last night that made me wonder. It said that change is inevitable but growth is optional. I pray with everything I am today that I can grow and become the man God intended me to be and not be the hapless loser that I am right now. Well that’s it for today. I hope no one actually reads this…