I want to believe that circumstances can work for our good.  I want to be able to look past frustrations and recognize that there’s a lesson or a refining or something that makes them worth enduring.  I want to be able to love people who are unlovable and forgive offenses time after time after time.  I want to be able to endure hardship, trusting that it’s because the Lord loves me that any difficulties come my way.  I want to be able to see the eternal reward as being of far greater value than the temporal cost.  I want for the incomparably good, unchanging, life-giving truth of the gospel – the truth that I was dead in my trespasses and sins, but that He has raised me up to new life – to be so magnified in my sight that it will, at all times, evoke from me its rightful response of praise.  I want to be able to lay my anger and hurt and fear at the cross and somehow find that peace that passes understanding and that unspeakable joy that can keep me from being fettered to my angst.

I talk to God about all of this, I promise I do.  I see the ugliness in how much I cringe at the thought of extending grace.  I see my selfishness and my short-sightedness and my faithlessness.  But I’m afraid of letting go.  I’m afraid of trusting.  I worry that counting everything else as loss – particularly those things that are most valuable to me – will result in me actually losing them, at least in part.  I don’t want my treasures to end up on the altar, only to find that there’s no ram caught in the bushes.

I don’t know how to honestly give my whole heart to Him, unless it is just to keep coming before Him with the utter mess that it is and laying it down.  Maybe it won’t ever be full of only unconditional love and great grace and unshakeable faith.  But perhaps the lesson is to pour out to Him all of my heart’s imperfections and weakness and bitterness and hurt, and then trust Him simply for the strength to choose right actions in the moment.  Not so much a fake it til you make it idea, but more an acknowledgement that even when His ways are beyond my understanding, they are trustworthy, and even when my emotions and momentary weight seem irreproachable, they are fallible.  I wish I could hope for more.  But maybe this can be enough for now.