There’s nothing as good as repentance. At least that’s what it feels like right now. For some time I have a singular item that is perfectly innocent from an outsiders perspective but has been a point of contention between the Lord and I for some time. It’s like I had been going back and forth, back and forth, for years about this objectively small issue of the heart. God’s way, my way, God’s way, my way, my way, my way, my way. Although the item was minute, it was creating a distance between me and God that was not. Don’t get me wrong I mentally know and knew everything I used to about God’s goodness, but it seemed the feeling of those truths was growing duller. I objectively started placing this particular item beside me while I had conversations with God. I’m not hiding anything. God knows everything but I decided I became fine with my way not being God’s way. I could see all of this happening of course, but it was just a little item, it was alright for everyone else, but I didn’t want to chose God’s way. I wanted my way. But it wasn’t fine. I could feel the hard heartedness settling in, the behavior compliance for appeasement in other areas, managing my performance for approval and acceptance despite this one thing I was holding onto of course. Well, the push comes to shove and it now is having negative consequences and side effects that are quicker, more immediate, less avoidable. Then my self management of my own poor choices kicks into even higher gear and I move other things around just to continue to accommodate ‘my preference’. It finally gets to a point of my own repeated choosing that the consequences begin to scare me. It is then in my fear, I ask for prayer. Not for my behavior or its consequences, but of my hard heartedness before the Lord. I was exhausted of myself rejecting him, especially knowing who he is, what he’s done for me, and how wretched my selfishness really is. I kept trying to climb out of a hole with the Lord I had dug myself into day after day. From the perspective of the bottom of this whole it was harder to see his face. I could remember it but I wasn’t feeling it. I could see him loving me but I wasn’t feeling it. The lack of his seeming nearness, mostly because of my botched conscious before the Lord became suffocating to exist within and because of that spiritual exfixiation I had to do anything possible to free myself from this rut. And then in an answer to someone else’s prayer for me, God allowed me to see his kindness. I saw that everything he was inviting me into was for my good. Everything he was inviting me out of was for my good. Everything I was resisting was actually literally harming me and the desires of my heart and impeding my answers to prayer. He wasn’t wanting to take anything away from me, but actually give me something in that things absence. He has better gifts for me. Not only better eternal things but a better life here and now. He was for me, no longer the rule enforcing, critiquing, petty, official my flesh wanted me to believe he had become. He was my creator who knows me better than anyone knows me. Better than I know myself. He sees all the variables–including my desires–and still promises to show me a better way, the best way for me. We don’t know the value we lose for things we don’t yield to him about, not only do we disobey what we hear but we sometimes intentionally turn our ears of to not even hear the thing we already do not want to obey. It is God’s grace and kindness that we can see clearly his motives in his intentions towards us. Motives to withhold no good thing. Motives to give us a long life full of peace and rest in him alone. His motive is for our joy, our happiness, our pleasure, and his glory. He is graciously stubborn in refusing to compromise regarding the compromises of our hearts. He is a stickler for our closeness to him, the best and safest place for us in the world to be. I had to fight all the thorns of lies that kept pushing me backwards–allowed by my own repeated choices–from this embrace in his arms. I had to fight against my own complacency to find my way back there into the strong loving embrace of my father. To be at rest again in his will, finally allowing myself to receive his affection again, hiding nothing, surrendering everything–well for now, at least this. I am so thankful for repentance. I can’t earn God’s approval or nearness through behavioral maneuvering and or my own position jockeying, because alone he care for the posture of my heart, not the external behaviors he is leading us out of. And so I follow him and hopefully glorify his holy name.