herlucidlife

1 Peter 4:3-4 

“for there has already been enough time spent in doing what the pagans choose to do: carrying on in unrestrained behavior, evil desires, drunkenness, orgies, carousing, and lawless idolatry. So they are surprised that you don’t plunge with them into the same flood of wild living and they slander you.” 

I see a lot of this behavior in myself. I spent years being drunk and high. I spent years being joyful that people were joining in a sinful lifestyle. Living a life of sexual impurity even still while fighting against porn and the desire to feel my body react. Putting things above God, though everything is below Him. 

As God continues to renew my mind and body, I feel the taste for certain things being removed. I have no desire to live and do what I used to do. That desire can be reborn if I stop doing what God has called me to do. I still have pornographic images in my mind. I still yearn to be wanted even though it’s not always in the way God designed. 

It feels like it was yesterday, doing my best to be okay with the way the world lived. I could never quite get past the shame and guilt I felt after every sexual encounter. Or the spiritual void I felt after every porn flick. The way my mind felt embarrassed by the years of drinking and smoking. It’s easy to look at the flesh as outward behaviors only, yet what about the loneliness and self-pity. It was the emotional and spiritual damage that created outward manifestations. 

I have struggled so long with lack of self acceptance, guilt, shame, manipulation, lying in order to be liked, fear and rejection. Fear of being abandoned, fear of not being liked, fear of being rejected, fear of not receiving. It was the heart posture I had toward myself that caused me to behave in ways that went against God. I was falling for the idea that everything outside of God could fix me, when it only created more wounds. 

God redeems time yet I do not believe that gives license to keep acting in a way that hurts God’s heart. I’ve wasted so much time being against God. This side of life is short, I only have but so much time to be with God on this side of the line. I’m thankful for today I am doing my best to live with God and not against Him.