I’m listening to a great song, The Altar and the Door by Casting Crowns. It talks about something that’s on my mind pretty often, namely that tenacious tendency we all have to get all fired up about making big changes in our lives, then run out of steam less than halfway to our goal. In a Christian context, think of it as the “Last Night of Camp” effect. In a more secular context, we might think of it as the New Year’s Resolution phenomenon.
We can’t put up with who we are or how we live for one more second. We cry, we pray, we re-dedicate our lives, to Christ, to weight loss, to financial responsibility, the list in inexhaustible and unique to each individual. The point is though, whatever we want to change, we have a plan. We’re with the program. We really mean it this time. And then we fail. We get distracted, life gets too hard, something happens that wasn’t part of our plan, and we give up. Then we hate ourselves, cry some more, and start the cycle over again. This is a bad thing, right?
Maybe, but then again maybe not. Here’s an example from my life. I want to lose twenty pounds. Always. Pretty much regardless of what I actually weigh at the time, I wish it was twenty pounds less. I go through this cycle with weight loss over and over where I have a great diet and exercise plan, I’m super dedicated to it, I start to lose weight, then I go out and consume every French fry and potato chip in the city of Abilene. More than once, this has frustrated me to the point that I want to quit altogether. I decide that I’m never going to lose those twenty pounds no matter what, I’ll just go and buy some bigger clothes, and eat what makes me happy. You know what happens then? I gain five to ten pounds a month.
Do you see my point? Even though it’s frustrating to never really reach my goal, even though there are set-backs and failures along my way, those re-dedications to a healthy lifestyle are apparently the only thing standing between me and constant binge eating/dangerous rates of weight gain. Some day, I hope and pray for more progress, but in the mean time, my short-lived attempts at self-control are having an effect. It’s not the effect I’m hoping for, but maybe it’s worthwhile anyway. Maybe it’s worthwhile because I’m still establishing the habit of paying regular attention to the issue of my health and well-being, and making a pretty frequent effort at practicing restraint and discipline.
I think this principle may be applicable to more than just healthy living. Maybe it’s true in any habit we want to break or establish, and true even in our dedication to Christ. I don’t know that Christ gets as annoyed by our frequent tearful returns to the altar as we do. Yes, He knows we’ll fail. He knows we’ll be back to repent again in the future, but maybe He also knows what kind of mischief and mayhem we are avoiding during our “good days” for lack of a better term. While we’re beating ourselves up for all the progress we failed to make, maybe we don’t realize how much ground we would have lost if we hadn’t tried.
I think that if nothing else, the cross tells us that our failures are not a problem for God. He’s already found a way to deal with my brokenness in the long run. In the short term, maybe it’s perfectly okay that I deal with my brokenness through trial and error, trying and failing, flying and falling. We may not be able to sustain the flight, the mountaintop, the fired-up-good-intentions-never-gonna-be-the-same kind of days, but at least we had them, and history indicates that we will have them again. Meanwhile, who knows what God is achieving in us through even our brief and sporadic efforts. God’s ability to accomplish His plans is always greater than my ability to mess them up.
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