The hardest thing is forgiving myself

The sky is different every night now. Not that it's ever the same, but it's possible that I just notice more because autumn is coming and that proves it to me. Things change in this life, constantly and effortlessly. Sometimes I see it, and sometimes I don't.

I have been trying to be a bigger person these days. Give more, want less. I want to make room in my heart for things that matter. I am trying my hardest to strip off laziness and a lukewarmness that I forgot I had branded into my forearm. There are important things that I have neglected or things that I have been missing and only just discovered. I used to ignore things that I should have done because people I didn't really love that hard did them. And I didn't want to be like them. Or people shoved at me to learn them, to take part in them. And I didn't want to give in. So I refused. I buried practices that should be habit by now, and I really didn't care.
If you didn't know, I'm a very apathetic person.
I can pretend something doesn't matter for years on end, and by the end of the years on end it really won't matter to me.
I denied myself many things for many reasons. Condemnation. Judgments. Desperation. A need to fit in, to be liked. Apathy.
One of my worst sins is apathy. And I've hidden it from people. I'm not all too compassionate about a lot of things, and that's not because I'm heartless, but because I've learned to be apathetic. It's easier, it is far easier my friends to not care. I even used to look at the sunsets and they were all the same to me. I didn't stop to admire them, because admiring something takes time. Caring about something takes time.
Caring for someone takes time.

These past few years my life has drastically changed. Slowly, I have been letting God whittle me down to a more beautiful woman. Things have gone, and I have grown. So now, now it is time to stop. Now it is time to care. I made myself into a very hard person. If you looked at my back, you would see the bruises and the scars, and you would know why I grew the tough skin on it. I have the hide of a rhino on my small, human back.
And it might just be the hardest thing to let my God cut off of me.

Lately, many of my friends and people I cross paths with have all been saying the same thing. I don't want to be legalistic, they tell me. And not to belittle their struggles or honest intentions, but I think many times people don't even know what that means. They don't understand the depth of that word. They can't see the tightness of its grip. The length of its whip. The raw skin it leaves in its wake. They don't understand.
I know legalism, I think to myself when I hear someone say something like that. And I get scared. And things hurt.
They don't know legalism, I think to myself when I hear someone say something like that.

I cried in my bedroom the other night. I just wept while I remembered who I used to be.
I was not a nice person.
I used to be legalistic. I try very hard not to be anymore. Because I know, I know legalism. I understand it. I've lived it. I've been hit by it, hard, till I fell to my knees and stomach and didn't ever want to get up again. I have been chained up by it, in love with it, enraptured by it, and almost murdered by it.
We are all hypocrites at one point or another in our walk beside our Carpenter. We mess up and say the wrong things and think bad things and make stupid choices and speak about something a little too harshly, but that doesn't mean we're legalistic. At the worst, that means we're hypocrites. Or probably it only means that you're a sinner saved by grace who is trying so very hard but fell into a hole they didn't see. I am a hypocrite sometimes.
But I used to be legalistic.
I could look at you and tell you everything you did wrong in your life even though you really haven't. I could look at you and see nothing wrong that you have done even though you've done it all. When you are a prisoner to legalism, everything is a rule, and it's usually the best that break all the rules. Because they know how to do it without getting caught.
I was never very good at legalism. I didn't break any rules.
At least I thought I wasn't any good. Not till I met other people and have listened to and read their words did I realize that just because I follow the rules doesn't mean I'm not good at them, and now I am sad. Because I'm actually very good, I am very good at legalism.
Take away the best at anything, and the second best will see how good they really are.
You don't have to break all the rules to be a legalist. That just makes you a legalist and a hypocrite.
For a long while, I thought I was just one of the two.

Do you know what it feels like to wake up every single day and know that you'll never meet the expectations you set for yourself? That you'll never be good enough?

So I hated everything. And I became apathetic and un-compassionate. I judged daily. I tried to live by works alone. I have little faith now sometimes because of that. I am always oriented to doing the things, never just believing. I hid my broken rules and counted myself a hypocrite, when really I was doing very well in the game of moralism. I learned it all. I studied it hard, and I despised it even harder. I was ashamed of myself and my actions to the point of tears so many times that I stopped crying. It was too hard to weep that much. I became angry. Dead inside.
In the end, I was a pile of dry bones, nothing more than a white-washed vessel. Empty. Done.
The thing about my story of Christianity that startles me is that I have changed many times. I am never the same. I grow.
I love that.

Two years ago I wrote two words in my journal that I plan to live by for the rest of my life.

Do better.

The most beautiful thing happened to me tonight as I watched the sun set. I cried a little. And I thought to myself, I want to care. I want to care like this about everything. I am so tired of apathy. Not caring makes you tired. It wears you out. It creases you in places you didn't think could bend. It is true that standing and running for so long will fatigue you. But laying on the ground will do the same.
It will make you never want to get up again.
Do better.
I demand that of myself daily. And it's my most gorgeous endeavour.