The Lord has been teaching me a lot about obedience. There have been many times in the past couple months where weekly, daily, even hourly, something will happen and I will have no other choice but to give it over to God. It took me a long time (and I am definitely still in the process) to realize that what I think is best for me is in actuality, not the best for me. In fact when I follow my own will it leads me down paths that I wish I never would have taken. Jesus has been gently prompting me to offer up all that I have to Him, so that He may show me what he wants of me.
As I have grown closer to Jesus and his Blessed Mother in the past few months, I have received a strong conviction of sin. Many things that I have done or didn't think were hurtful to others or myself have been unveiled to me, leaving me with a stark image of a sin I didn’t know was there. After this process of further conviction of sin in my life, there came a profound realization of my nothingness apart from Jesus Christ. Again, after this realization of my own nothingness, I finally grasped that I must cleave to the Truth in all things. This was more than just saying that I need to “put Christ first in my life” as many people put it. I’m talking about an acute, severe, and overwhelming sense of my broken human nature... and the only way I will ever be able to survive is to beg God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be with me always. Apart from the Trinity, I can do nothing.
A sin that I was not aware of in my life is envy. You’d think I would have been able to recognize that, right?
“Simply put, envy is a resentment of others based on the conclusion that they have what we do not possess."The devil must rejoice over those who are caught up in envy! He must be thrilled when he sees a child of God, a child blessed with His graces and infinite love, but who still thinks they are missing something. What a trick satan plays on us, but worse... we fall for it. I do, at least. I found this quote on envy which pretty much perfectly sums it up...
"Envy is void of any good feeling. We are not seduced by envy as much as we are consumed by it, as if being swallowed by a monster. This image was not lost on Shakespeare whose character Iago (in the play Othello) says, “O! Beware, my lord, of jealousy (envy); it is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”Exactly it. Envy does not attract us, it is not something we are seduced into as this quote says.. but it is something that consumes us. One experience of envy I had not too long ago hit me just like that. I thought someone had something that I wanted myself. Now my initial response to this (for no reason other than my sinful nature) was envy; I was devoured by this empty sinking feeling. I even knew at that very time that I had no good reason for being upset but I couldn’t stop it. It sat with me, in me, and didn’t budge. A quote from the same article says,
"Envy is indeed a monster that consumes us, making us uncomfortably aware of the emptiness we have within, of the hunger that we possess for we know not what. As a result, envy drives us to accumulate, to possess and to consume in order to fill the empty space."
But that empty space is not intended to be filled with the person/object/possession we desire on earth. It can’t be. We were not created to be fulfilled by something anything other than God. Our beginning and end is not a boyfriend or the latest fashion. Our beginning and end is Jesus Christ. I thought that I was offering up to Jesus everything that I had, but I was keeping something to myself. Jesus doesn't want most of us, half of us, some parts of our life. He want’s it all. I wasn’t offering all of me and the Lord made that clear to me tonight. I was convicted of this sin. Jesus definitely used something awful like envy to draw me even closer to His merciful heart, because in Him all things are made good.
When we allow the devil to lead us into this sin, we are greatly grieving the heart of our Lord.
“Envy comes from people’s ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts.” It is indeed the symptom of an illness — a condition characterized by our inability to recognize our own good fortune.”Each person is blessed with all of the gifts they need. When we fall prey to envy, we are rejecting the fact that God has given us talents and gifts... we think that we must have the characteristic, appearance, or gift of another in order to be good. The fact of the matter is each second we take a breath is a gift from God. He made us exactly as He intended to: with all of the characteristics necessary for us to rise to the fullness of life on earth. It doesn’t matter what someone else’s walk looks like. What matters is my walk with Christ and what he is calling me to do. He didn’t need to create us but He did as a completely gratuitous gift, and that alone should leave us in a state of constant gratitude. If from this second forward I never “felt” the love of God again, that would be fine. I should be constantly rejoicing in the fact that He was generous enough to give me LIFE at all. This leads into detachment which I will discuss at a later day.
"I became the most humble and the most abject of all men, that you might overcome your pride. Learn O dust, to obey; learn to humble yourself, and how to bow under the feet of all. Learn to break your own will, and yield yourself up to all subjection."
