Trying To Be Like Jesus

When I was eleven years old I became a Christian. It was wonderful, it was real.

 And when I stare behind me and see those years after 11, I remember an increasing frustration and sense of guilt instead of increasing joy and peace like the Bible promised.

Why? Basically, it was because I tried to be like Jesus. I ... I.... I tried to be like God. But that wasn't my job and the frustration grew because I was in the wrong job. I plopped myself into an impossible career, one no person on Earth can handle, though I tried for the next 25 years.

I'd go to church every Sunday and was preached at that I should tell people about Jesus ("tell, tell,tell..that's the main thing") and I thought that meant telling strangers about the Jesus in the Bible. And my guilt grew like trees because talking to strangers scared me to tiny pieces.

I was told to 'be ye perfect' and I tried so hard and scribbled tons of plans and read stacks of books and tried and tried to be perfect. But I never even came close. And guilt grew taller and a sense of failure, too, as well as the need to wear a mask to hide all this mess. To appear as something I should be, but wasn't.

Probably many of you know exactly what I mean and it would be like watching your own version of "This Is Your Life."

Finally, God gave me a break. You could even say He put me out of my misery. He got my attention one night 12 years ago--and there was so much love. He knew I needed love after all the years of mental abuse and stress I'd given myself. But that night, the room was alive with love and acceptance--from Him. And that is when it's best--when the love comes straight to your heart from God's, bypassing other people, places or things first. At least, that is what I've found.

He told me we were starting over because I'd run this whole thing into a bottomless, dark ditch. I'd taken the reigns from Him many years prior and I'd gotten lost somewhere out in the Fog Of Doing It All Myself.

How good to begin again, to take baby steps with my tiny hand curled around His fingers. God was there to pull me back up and remind me that it's up to Him to keep me walking. My job is to cooperate. To learn. He loved me through it every mile of the way, never tossed me aside in my failures. 

Oh, there are hard times, yes. It is never easy to die. 

Over again I've had to die to what I had wildly insisted was true all my life. I've had to face the ugly, mishapen quasi-Christian creature I had formed and oh, how shocking to see that in His light! But how good of Him to stand beside me while facing it.

And whenever I fall, God is there to pull me up and remind me that it's up to Him to keep me walking. It's up to me to simply cooperate with whatever He tells me. And He loves me through it all.

And finally the little girl who was once 11 and terrified of telling others about Jesus, well, she can just laugh about that because how hard is it to tell others about the best friend you ever had?



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