So we are facing it again, a family member forsaking.
And it's this, last week, along with all the sickness, that I'm fighting. There are late phone calls with a lonely sister and long night hours tending sick kids and wondering why.
"He says it's God's will and that I should be content with that."
Tuesday afternoon, the two middle tykes asleep, and Nath, all fevery and his ear running, in the bathtub. I can't breathe, so I shut the door and leave the shower blasting hot, so that the room fills with steam. I take deep breaths, my head back against the bathroom wall.
I've got three versions of the Bible on my lap, all open to Romans 1. It's not the why I'm wondering now, it's the how.
"I get it. I mean, who doesn't want freedom? No doubt you're freer when you forsake all your responsibilities."
It's the how.
The how you go from admitting that to actually walking out the door and going through with it.
An Ann Voskamp post leads me here, to a chapter I'd always thought was about those who had never heard the Word with their ears. But now I see: it can also be about those who don't hear with their hearts.
And how does it happen that God gives one over to sin, when what can be known of God is made plain to him? It starts here:
“For although they knew God, they did not honor
Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became
futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened…And since they
did not see fit to acknowledge God, God
gave them up to a debased mind to do what
ought not to be done.
They were filled with all manner of
unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder,
strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers,
haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to
parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
Though they know God's
righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve
to die, they not only do them but give
approval to those who practice them.”
Nathan reaches again and again for the soap as it floats through his fingers.
This, this gets me: how often do I refuse to honor Him as God, do I fail to give Him thanks?
It starts here.
Rivers run down the window's face.
I feel a like a baby crying, and there's no daddy in the room...
...like Nathan, reaching for soap that's slipping right through...
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