I tried to be good...

I remember sitting in front of the TV, nursing a baby, scrolling mindlessly through a 100 channels when something on the screen jarred me out of my zombie state.  I was sucked into to marathon veg fest of "17 Kids and counting".   Right there on that couch I had finally found what I had been looking for... "the perfect Christian woman".   Michelle Duggar became the model that I pattered my life after.  She seemed to me to be exactly what every Christian woman should be and I wanted to be just like her.

Let me back track a little...  Growing up I was a wild child, least likely to succeed, bottom of my class and many other things that don't really matter now, but in my heart that's not really the girl I wanted to be.  Now that I'm an adult I can look back at my teenage rebel self and see with different eyes and I love that girl now, but I hated her then.  I did stuff I hated and I couldn't figure out why or how to not do it again.

At 19 I heard that greatest news of my life.  For the first time in 19 years someone explained the Gospel to me and this what they told me...

God created us.  He set some rules for his creation that were for their own good.  People broke those rules.  Sin separated us from God.  He had a plan to restore us to himself, because He loved us too much for us to be eternally separated from Him.  He sent His own Son to pay the penalty we could not pay.  If we accepted through faith the GIFT that was given to us we could be reconciled to God for eternity.

I could agree there was a God, but up until that point in my life I didn't know much about him, except He wanted me to be good and I didn't know how, so I agreed with all that.  I could not ever be good enough for God.  In fact I was really shocked when the church didn't catch on fire as my mom marched us down the center aisle to the front of the church, to sit close enough to the "holy man" to get sprayed with spittle when he got really excited.

When He shared the Gospel (good news) about Jesus I knew I had never in my life heard any better news and even though I had no idea what it meant to give my life to him, I handed over my messy life to Him and received His clean life.

I started going to church all the time (and liked it), started reading my Bible ( and LOVED it), started praying and talking to God about all my worries, fears, hopes and dreams...  I was astounded with this new experience with Jesus.

I knew I was supposed to be a new creation now and in a lot of ways I was, but what I didn't realize was that I still had all that old junk in there too.  It wasn't mysteriously gone.  I didn't know that God was going to be working on me from the inside out for the rest of my life.

Sadly, after a while I figured out that I still wasn't good.  I tried really hard for a while...  but some old things die hard.  I decided to give up trying...  so I quit going to church, stopped reading my Bible and I definitely couldn't pray, because I couldn't stand to think about God knowing all my junk.

I ran as far away from God as I could go, but He NEVER left me.  He continually called me back.  He whispered His love to my soul.  He drew me in with His promise that no matter what I have ever done or will ever do, NOTHING could cause Him to give up on me.  During that time I tried to drown out His voice so I could go on with my life without hearing from Him, but it never worked.

Against my will I ended up at church on a Sunday morning, feeling sick to my stomach, knowing I was polluting the people around me, worrying what rumors they might have heard about me, and wishing I could be anywhere else.  Standing up front the preacher passionately shared the story of the prodigal son.  Telling all who would listen about the son who had wasted his inheritance on partying and prostitutes and found himself cleaning pig pens and eating slop.  How the son decided to turn around and go home and beg forgiveness, but as He was approaching His Father, who had been waiting for him every day, started running to him and wrapped him up in his embrace. The Father wrapped his robe around him, restoring him to the family and then throwing a party to celebrate his home-coming.

The second best news of my life wrapped around my soul that day.  I promised myself that day I would do whatever I had to do to make up to my Father all that I had wasted.  I still didn't understand how GOOD God was.  I didn't understand that there would be many more times in my life that I would have to turn back to my Father and that He would ALWAYS have open arms for me.  I didn't understand GRACE.

Grace- favor, love and acceptance that I COULD NEVER EARN.

I wanted to put as much distance between me and that girl who had wasted her life.  I didn't want anything in my life to resemble that girl I was.

That's where Michelle Duggar comes in.  If I copied her and did what she did then maybe I could finally be good enough.  So I started growing my hair long, wearing only skirts, making sure my house was perfect and my children were well-behaved.  I tried to talk with a sugar-sweet voice, I tried to be the perfect wife and mother.

I found out it was really hard to be someone else.  I really missed my old faded blue-jeans, and I'm not really a great house cleaner, so my house was always a mess (so no one could stop-by, I would die 50 slow deaths), my hair starts breaking off after it gets passed my shoulders and if you know me at all, you KNOW I don't have a sugar-sweet voice.  My kids talk about farting and every other in-appropriate thing in the world and sometimes my husband and I have heated exchanges that would disqualify me for perfect wife.

The harder I tried to be like her the more I felt like a failure.  I wanted to be good enough, but striving to be someone that I perceived to be good, was more like a full-time job.  The heavy burden starting making me anxious and I didn't want to be around anyone, because I felt like people were always judging me... and they thought I was judging them.  I started to suffer with depression and I HATED my life.

A friend at church, who had seen the inner struggle and who was smart enough to know that I was trying to EARN what had already been given to me, handed me a Bible study called "Stuck".  The first week the verses were all centered in Ephesians chapter 1-2.  That week I reread those chapters repeatedly until they were imprinted in my mind...  and I heard the 3rd best news of my life...

"For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do."  Eph 2:10

Time is too short to share all the verses that lead up to this one, but the basic thing that struck my heart like a lightning bolt that day was that God created me (individually) for reasons that He decided long before I was born.  He made me ME!!!  That day I quit trying to be someone else.  I still have a great love for Michelle as a woman, who obviously loves Jesus, BUT that day I felt like chains had been removed from my body.  I felt for the first time in my life the true freedom of GRACE.

For the first time in my life I knew that I was never going to be good enough for myself or anybody else and that was ok.  The freedom of knowing that I could NEVER do anything to earn God's favor was life-giving news.

Knowing that God loved me infinitely more than I could understand on my best day and my worst day set me free from earthly expectations (mine and others).

I'm not going to do the "right" things all the time and that's ok...  I'm not going to respond the right way or speak kindly all the time.  I'm never going to be perfect and that's some good news!!!