Pardon my dust, God's remodeling.

God created the world in seven days, not 15 seconds.

Though I suppose He could have if He wanted to, He’s GOD.

God gave us an earthly version of Himself, His name is Jesus.

Jesus was born from a mother, like all other people.

And it took Him the normal amount of years to grow up,

Like all other people.

He didn’t materialize in an instant.

And just like everyone else, it took him his entire youth and several more years

Into his adulthood to be equipped with all of the lessons

God had for Him to share with the world.

He wasn’t born fully educated.

People today, Christian or not, a physically incapable

of doing anything instantly…

Be it learning a new language

Losing weight

Healing from cancer

Or Seeing the whole world.

Everything that is worth doing takes time.

So why are we so obsessed with instant gratification?

Fast food

Fast acting medicine

Sex with a guy you just met at the bar…

Has no one noticed that with said instant gratification

Comes much higher risk? Quality is sacrificed immensely.

With food, it must be cheaply made in large bulk amounts to keep up

with the demand rate. This means rounding up the shoddiest ingredients.

With faster-acting medicine comes either dosages that are more dangerous

Or something that simply masks the symptom

while the root of the problem goes unchecked.

Sex with a stranger, someone whom you aren’t married to often results in

one or all of four things:

1)      broken heart

2)      STD

3)      Baby with no father

4)      Disrespect for people

And except for the sex with strange people, I will admit I’m guilty of being one of those people who rushed the day and opted for something “quick and easy” or who got impatient when something wasn’t “quick and easy”… and surely this is forgivable

But let me not commit the sin of losing sight of what matters-

All things worth something in life take time.

and my specific example with be my return to Christianity.

It doesn’t happen overnight.

I have heard stories of people who had hit rock bottom

and were suffering until someone introduced them to Christ.

Once they became a Christian, everything turned around.

Or did it?

I’ve read dozens of testimonies where someone said they could see

An “instant change” in the person.

But where I went wrong was confusing “instant change” with

“instant transformation.”

For the longest time, I thought when I really gave my life to God,

I would instantly be a great person.

So when a negative outlook on life and attitude about myself lead me

To down spiral into a life of sin for four or five years,

I knew one day I’d go back to my Christian roots and I figured

I could just do it in the snap of my fingers.

Boy was I wrong

Do you know the saying “old habits die hard”?

It is the perfect saying to describe my

very real transition back to following Christ.

One time last fall,

I was with my now fiancée at his parents’ house

(At that time, he was living there)

And I had made some comment that I know

Wasn’t particularly loving about someone in his family

Who hadn’t been particularly loving towards me.

His mom overheard it, and asked me

“Aren’t you a Christian?”

Meaning “Shouldn’t you be nice and show all God’s love to so-and-so?”

Obviously, I still think about that instance

Because it proves my point.

When we choose to make a change for the better,

It shows, but it doesn’t happen overnight.

At this time in 2012, I was at my lowest point.

I was broken up from my fiancée for awhile

And I was living my life as far from God as possible.

In late April or maybe early May,

I felt the tug strongest on my heart to return to Him.

The means by which I would do so would be to return

To a church I was terrified of.

Why was I terrified?

Because it had been my “family” for a few years

And just like a real family, they knew some intimate detail

About my life that I wished they didn’t.

They also were mostly all happily married

and here I was, single and hurting.

I wanted to be anywhere but there.

But I returned. Alone.

I sat with a girl who was a friend and she was single too.

I felt bad like someone going through rehab.

I was sweating, nervous, tired, weak, heart pounding.

It was all from anxiety.

I kept pushing forward, though.

After a few months, I realized that they weren’t judging me

And that they only wanted to see me be okay.

Soon I was comfortable there and had joined a bible study too.

By the end of summer, I was focused on knowing the greater good

That God had planned for me.

I was “over” the life I had been living.

That was all a little less than two years ago.

Eventually, I regained my fiancée as a friend

Later as a future husband.

I gained many new friends, all from church.

I made connections.

I got a mentor and others who looked out for me.

But I wasn’t instantly a “pure and wonderful child of God”….

But I was still a child of God,

I just still had much brokenness in me.

I have a permanent streak of filth running in my figurative veins

as a result of poor choices.

Once you lose your innocence, you can’t really “un-lose” it.

The damage can be done in a matter of days, hours even seconds if you pinpoint the moment something happened…

But the healing can take a very long time.

You can become a new creation in Christ and your sins can be forgiven,

But the memory of those sins will be forever ingrained on your mind and heart.

The blessing is, you can use them as part of a testimony

to teach others what not to do.

The leftover brokenness and damage and sinful nature

resulted in months of actions that might not have been very Christian,

even after the choice to change.

I am still guilty of it now.

Though I don’t party with dangerous people or abuse substances

Or purposefully try to cause chaos,

I fall short in so many other ways-

Like snide comments or crude humor

or wanting to retaliate when people hurt me.

God will keep working in me.

I know I’ve come a long way.

I still have a long way to go.

Just like the fast food is made of cheap meat

that can be wrangled in large quantities for mass distribution in a hurry,

any change I could make that did seem to be instant

wouldn’t be genuine.

I mentioned this in the last blog post,

And I’ll mention it again:

My job told me to “fake it to make it”.

As part of a lesson on improving my customer service, they said that

If I am not feeling happy, I must pretend to be happy anyway,

because customers don’t want to deal with my issues.

They want me to deal with theirs.

For a rough day in which I am not feeling well and have been yelled at

By a grumpy old man who decided to take out

his issues with a $3 maintenance fee on me,

“fake it to make it” might be the best option.

But in real life, with loved ones and friends,

You have to be genuine.

Whatever you are trying to be, it needs to be real.

If you are a Christian,

That smile needs to come from a happy heart within

That glows and radiates with God’s love.

Though at times I must grin and bear something,

I’d rather work on growing in God for those spiritual fruits

Even though I’ll occasionally say or do something stupid.

It doesn’t happen overnight.

But I have complete faith it will happen.