Nearsightedness

The following is a retraction to last month's blog.

Since my childhood, I have been severely near-sighted and must wear corrective lenses to see anything more than a a few inches away from my face. Without my glasses or contacts, the world is a blur. Over the last few weeks, I am also realizing how spiritually near-sighted I am as well.

I spend most of my time looking right in front of me at my "trouble spots" and coming up with rules and restrictions to reign in the bad habits (hence the topic of last month's blog). I find myself frequently searching for the formula that will work to conquer the behaviors that I don't like in myself. I forget to put on my spiritual glasses that allow me to see the God that loves me, wants to help me grow and has the power to conquer anything! While the rules and restrictions work for awhile and are comfortable to me, they have not affected lasting change. I still eat too many sweets and I still buy things that I can't afford and then feel guilty..... Granted I see great improvements in many of my "trouble spots", but I think this has less to do with my success at following the rules and more due to God's grace manifesting itself in my life.

Freedom doesn't come from following a set of rules or by imposing restrictions.
Freedom comes when I quit focusing on me and focus on God.

This is a basic spiritual truth, one might wonder why someone who has been a Christ follower for many years would not have realized this before. Of course I have heard this preached from the pulpit and read these words in various contexts before. Yet it suddenly struck me a few weeks ago that while I have heard this truth previously, I really wasn't believing it and certainly wasn't acting on it.

I want to give up the idea of "self" control and shift to "God" control. I have been pondering what it means in day-to-day reality to focus on God and not on my self-imposed rules or restrictions. I am finding it hard to change the pattern of thought that I have to fix it all myself. I find myself still taking off my spiritual glasses, leaving God in a blur, and focusing either on a plan to do better or on my own inadequacies and failures. I wish there was some type of spiritual LASIK so that I could always see God with 20/20 vision.