Things are getting better day-by-day and I don't understand it.
One thing I'm recognizing is that my devotion to God, somehow, someway, is becoming stronger.
I realize I am not so legalistic as I was, even though my selfishness astounds me still. My husband has deep needs to be respected and restored. These things are coming out in our studies of Love and Respect and I fall way-short of the wife God created me to be. The helper. The help meet. However, he shows no disgust toward me...as if my sin has not created a hole in his heart and I am not the guilty one, holding the bloody knife. I am shocked at my own deception. Where did learn to I stray so far?
And when it's too much for me to be the wife I want and need to be, and when I am overwhelmed, I have found words coming from my very own mouth which are disrespectful and self-righteous. Ugh.
How dare I, right? How do I manage such nerve? I long to have righteousness and truth at the heart of our marriage, that is the truth, but I remain so dull. So vain. So evil-minded. To the point of thinking words like the above actually come from the Holy Spirit. When really it is my own fear of intimacy and laziness. Fear is yet in me and I must master it or it will kill us both.
Yet God's love remains. So foreign to me, this is. I've heard and read of God's sovereignty, but truly I have no right to take part in this heritage. I am but rags. Even now, these things are preposterous to God. "No," He says, "you are a daughter of the King. Redeemed. Now come to Me in repentance and start anew. I will give you the sweet words which have eluded you for so long."
I have heard Bible study after Bible study and I know the truths. I didn't have to be raised 'in the church' or with the Word to know I have hidden the truth in my heart and sinned against God, my husband, my family, my own peers, my child. It is only by the grace of God that I hid His truths deep in my heart, for they are there, but they cannot possibly apply to me.
No, no. I am the impossible who turned away and will be burned, not redeemed. Impossible to bring me to repentance. The Lord will say, "I never knew you." I can't possibly have a place among the saints or have any purpose.
Although. Although, I feel even if I am rejected, He would still be worth serving the rest of my life. (Ah, the battle of the elected vs. free will.) Predestination. I've taken my fair share of free will. Of that, I am certain.
