Tension

I've been mulling over this post for the last little while. June is the new January says Ann Voskamp, and I desperately want to believe her.

I, for one, can barely even believe it's June. It can't be June; I haven't read enough books, written enough essays, gone for enough runs for it to be June. And yet the calendar doesn't lie. It is June and once again I am faced with the fear that I haven't done enough.

Truth be told, I probably haven't. I haven't accomplished those lofty goals I set for myself earlier this year; haven't [insert cliché about radical life change here]. Goals are very easy to make and very hard to live out. I learn this year after year.

Thankfully, year after year I also learn and relearn of God's grace toward me. I hear him whisper through His word stories of people who were like me; people who fell again and again, but whom He continued to love and help to their feet and place on the right path.

I live these days in that tension of grace and discipline. God is a God of both, something that seems so radical in our world. We think that love doesn't involve correction or rebuke and our earthly love suffers for it. Grace and discipline: both necessary, both born out of love.

I need discipline in my life more than anything this June. I know God's grace is abounding towards me, and always will be, but I hear him calling me into the depths of obedience this winter and I am making an effort to heed his call.

For me, obedience looks like dragging my stubborn body out of bed in the morning to the chair where I have a remote chance of focusing in prayer. It looks like putting on less-than-stylish running shoes on cold evenings and getting out into the street. It looks like sitting down and staring at a blank page every night, praying for inspiration to come.

Even if inspiration doesn't come this winter, I will come. I'm making a conscious effort to put one foot in front of another on those late night runs, to let my fingers hover over the keyboard until the words form in my brain. I am simply going to show up for my life; sometimes that can be the most radical act of obedience.

"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" -- I know this to be all too true, ten days in. My body does not want discipline, it doesn't want to die to self.

But I will fix my eyes on the one who went before me, the one whose life was full of grace and discipline.

He did it, and in His strength so can I.