The apostle Paul lists self-control as one of the fruits of
Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). As we deepen our lives in faith, self-control
can be one of the byproducts. Those who
participate in efforts such as the “Get Rid of It” challenge are practicing a
discipline of disconnecting from “things.”
As we learn to let go of the “things” of life, they cease to have
control over us, our thoughts, our attention and our time. We learn to say, “No” or “Not now” or at
least “Not yet,” and in doing so we gain self-control.
The
process seems great in theory and yet many people have trouble with
self-control. As Paul wrote to the
Romans, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do
not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) How many
times have you tried to start a new habit or avoid an old one? How many times have you said, “This is the
last time…”? And yet there you are with
another donut or another cigarette or streaming another episode. There you are letting life slip by or doing
the very things that are supposed to make life shorter. There you are pretending (as we all often
pretend) that God is not there, or if God is there, God doesn’t really matter.
Yet
often it is not a conscious choice, choosing things over God. Things just seem to have a way of crowding
the divine out of our minds. There is
some pretty strong biology that goes into this as well. Most of the things we get obsessed about
stimulate or over-stimulate the pleasure centers of our brains. Part of the reason that people are drawn to fast
food is that there is still a primitive part of us that sees the advantage of a
meal with high levels of sugar and fat (cheap calories) with high levels of
salt (easy electrolytes). We are only
about 10000 years from life on the savannah, where such a meal would be a
prize.
And
then there are the whole slew of things that are simple distractions from
unpleasant tasks. Why do your taxes when
“Game of Thrones” is about to start?
I’ll do this after one more video, one more dog-shaming meme. It’s not that any of these are necessarily bad
in and of themselves. I like a good dog-shaming
picture as much as the next guy:
He knew not what he did.
It is when we cannot stop, when time slips away as we sit there in a
pixelated daze, when we cede control to the device in front us, that
distraction becomes more problematic.
There
are all sorts of strategies for developing good habits and controlling bad
ones. Sites like Habitica and
SuperBetter try to gamify the work.
There are also plenty of tracking apps to help the process. Recently, I have found it helpful to keep a
journal tracking the time between lapses and simply trying to add an hour the
next time. I have always had a weakness
for sweets. So if I eat a cookie and
then eat another 12 hours later, the next time I will try to wait 13
hours. It’s not perfect, but I find once
the gap is large enough, the thoughts are less obsessive and the time added
gets longer.
The process
is not perfect because I am perfectly human and I live in a world with easy
access to sweet treats. For all the
effort and for all the good intentions, sometimes I stumble. Sometimes I want to scrap the whole process. Sometimes I just need to start over.
And the
good news is that this whole process is undergirded by the grace of God. It turns out that God doesn’t love me less
because I eat a cookie. It turns out
that God doesn’t love me less because I make a mistake. It turns out that God will continue to love
me as I stumble over the path of discipleship, that God has made space for me
even as I struggle to make space for God; that God remains with me as I
struggle, as I give up, as I start over.
Remember that the path of discipleship itself is a gift, even the
struggles on that path. We walk together
following Jesus, the one who loves us when we stand still and loves us as we stumble
and loves us as we walk.
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