There is a secular recovery saying that contains much truth. It is this: “We will not change, until the pain of being stuck becomes greater than the pain and fear of change”. As anyone who has tried to change will tell you, change is difficult. When I reached the sage of my journey where I first started to see my (desperate) need to change, I tried, I really did. In the midst of coming to the realization that I could not do this, I was given a (mental) picture that illuminated for me just how difficult it is to change. The picture was is that of an old fashioned cart with large spoked wooden wheels. The cart was sitting in a cart track where it had cut deep furrows into the mud. In my picture the furrows were deep, showing the wear of much use over many years, and the axle of the cart was at times scraping the central mound.
The thing about the ruts of life, is that once you get into them, the ruts are very likely to determined the way you go. What I saw was that perhaps by exerting almost super human effort, you could manage to push/pull the cart part of way up the side of the rut. The reason it is so hard of course, is because in order to get the cart out of the rut, you essentially have to lift the weight of the cart, and its heavy, weighed down with all the garbage you and I have one way or the other, accumulated in life. By a tremendous continued effort, you could keep the cart at that level, but the moment you relax, the weight of the cart would cause it to tumble back down to the bottom of the rut. Far too often you find yourself right back at square one, or perhaps worse as the weight and the momentum of the cart might actually make the rut deeper, and you could find yourself straddled on the central hump in the road (there were times I did not even seem to be able to move!).
So it is not just the pain and the fear of change that makes it difficult, but the incredible effort it takes to get out of the ruts of life. And then there is the ease with which we so easily fall back into the same old, same old. No wonder we tell ourselves “Its too hard, I can't do this”. It can seems like our “carts” are truly stuck. Have you been there yet? I have! It seems that sometimes we have to come to the end of ourselves, before we become willing to turn to God and ask for His help. Too often He is our last resort, when if we were wise He would be our first resort. In my own journey, I became hurt enough and desperate enough to try anything, yes even God. But when I turned to Him, I found Him to be faithful. I found that His grace is sufficient for me. I found that His strength becomes perfect in my weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). I found that “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27).
The help that we get from God is multifaceted. He wants to heal our broken hearts, He wants to love on us, He wants to restore our self worth (or to give it to us if we never ever had it). He wants to help us in our struggles, He wants to comforts us in our pain. He wants to show us how valued we are in His sight, He wants to replace our shame with dignity, exchange the ashes of our lives with beauty. He wants to restore to us the joy which has withered away. He wants to come along side as our helper, He is even willing to change our desires, and to give us the wherewithal to do the things that are good and right and proper.
He could do most of this without our cooperation of course, but as one person put it “Without God man cannot, without man, God will not”. This has to do with affording us dignity. He will not force Himself upon us, and besides He wants all of us. He is a passionate God and He desires that we be passionate about Him. Nothing less than everything will do. He paid an incredible price so that He could bring us close. While we were yet sinners (in our rebellion) He died to save us from ourselves, from our sin and from eternal separation form all that is evil and bad. In light of this, how can we give Him anything less than our best, than all we are and have? In light of His tender mercies it is only reasonable that we present ourselves to Him as a living sacrifice, so that in His presence we might we transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:1,2).
And it is in His presence that everything changes. In His presence we see things as they really are. In His presence we receive healing. In His presence there is fullness of life and fullness of joy. When we drift away, we fall back into the fog of our addictions, our selfishness, our self indulgences, our sin and our hurt and our pain, our confusion our emptiness and our loneliness. We cannot be full of self and full of Him. We cannot be full of anger, or resentment or lust or pride and be full of Him. And we can't even by empty (though we can certainly feel empty). We are all full of something, even if it is only consciousness of our pain!
In fact this is a spiritual application of the physical principle “nature abhors vacuum”. You can't take the air out of a glass (for example) without putting something else into it. When we simply try and stop doing the things that we are doing, either something else will rush in to fill the void, or we will slide back into the same old rut. If we want to get rid of the garbage in our lives, it is not enough to stop doing the bad. We need to be replace the bad with something good. This is all explained in a passage in Matthew (12:43-45) where we are told that when the unclean spirit is cast out and it comes back to find the house clean and swept and empty, he brings with it 7 daemons worse than himself, and the latter sate of the man is worse than the former state. This exactly describes my own experience, my journey. I knew that the life I was living was not good, but was not immediately ready to surrender to Him. I tried to become an oak of righteousness, but it was not a planting of the Lord (Isaiah 61: 3), it was my own effort and it got old and tired very quickly. I then began to slide, slowly at first but quickly much much faster, until I was indeed worse off. I remember the moment of surrender at home alone looking in the mirror and not liking what I saw. “I cannot fight you any more” I told the Lord. “I am not fighting you Phil”, He told me. He took me into His embrace, and almost immediately I had to wonder why I fought Him so hard, it all seemed so right to be there with Him. It was then, and it is now many years later.
I have never regretted my decision to follow Him. He is always faithful, even when I am not. I have learned though that if I want to stay free, I need to stay close to Him. I have learned if and when I fall, to quickly return to Him. He is faithful and just to forgive and to cleanse me when I confess my sins (1 John 1:8). I don't pretend it is always easy, but I do know that it is always worth it. He heals, He binds up the broken heart, He fill us with good things, and always leads us the way we should go. And the way we should go is what we knew all along, it is the way of righteousness, the way of goodness. We exchange or bad habits for ones that bring life. When we do it His way, we have help, we have a lot of help. I have learned that His ways are not only good and right and proper, they are smart! I have learned the truth that when the Son sets you free, you are free indeed (John 8:36).
(See also the posts “The freedom that enslaves”, “Slavery that frees” and “If the Son shall set you free, you will be free indeed” August 2010).
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