So, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to survive tough things when it never seems to end. My parents have given me the perspective of "you should be thankful you have so much; there are people who are REALLY suffering out there". While I know that's the right way to look at it, that attitude is just not one I can manage when I haven't seen my husband for days, am struggling to find meaning in copying or working on Excel sheets for hours at my job,and realizing that my few friends are SO far away geographically. Mark finished his 6 month journey through medicine and surgery, and despite being done with 70 hours/week, overnights, weekends, just general junk schedule, we're now moving on to even more of the same. We've been living like we're just trying to survive for so long that I wonder if the damage we're doing now to finish school is going to be worth the "payoff" in the end. Exactly what that payoff will consist of is still foggy, like so much else in Mark's (our) journey through med school. So, the questions constantly running through my head lately are these: Is this marathon worth it if we end up so battered at the end that we no longer recognize who we were when we started? Is it possible to have a better attitude through this? Of course, we both want to believe that we have years of enjoying the fruit of our struggles ahead. It's so hard sometimes. At work, I have a post-it note on my computer with 2 Timothy 1:7 on it. "For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline." Huh. I don't know about you, but my spirit feels like nothing BUT fear right now. I'm not feeling God's power, I'm SO not loving sometimes and if I had any self-discipline at all, I wouldn't be uncomfortable in a two-piece swimsuit for the first time in my life...ew. How do I get to this spirit of power?
We were reading a devotion last night (literally the first one in like 6 months), and it was talking about prayer. It made the point that when our communication with God is clogged because of unrepented sin, we can't expect growth. This is not a new concept for me, but in talking to Mark about it and being intentionally, sort of painfully introspective, I realized that my prayer life is so frequently full of "God please give this person safety; please let Mark's exam go well; thank you for this" that I rarely take time to look at my actions throughout the day and repent for those that I know were wrong.
Could it be that my spirit of fear is brought on by my lack of repentence? That I'm not living in a spirit of power because there's a self-imposed dam blocking what God really wants for me? If this is true, I am able to clear my relationship with God simply by taking time to repent for the sins, big and small that I live in each day. Like a stream clogged by debris after a hard rain, all it takes for a clear, even flow is to move that debris. That's the goal.
