Committed Unto Death

This Resurrection Sunday, (yesterday) I came to realise something I've known for a long time, but have somehow managed to avoid until now. I have a legitimate fear of planning things. Planning meals, planning my day, planning how to react in certain situations, planning dates, planning days off, planning special time with the kids, planning special time with Nathan, or friends. And my spontaneity is not shared by the majority. In fact, planning things is not just hard. It's crushing. It makes me afraid. Afraid that my plans aren't good enough, or that they won't work out. Afraid that because of the illegitimacy of my heart, my plans will always be lacking important things. Like leaving for a birthday party and forgetting the present, or having a blowout away from home, having forgotten the diaper bag. Or showing up at the pool without swimming suits. Or worse yet, having someone over and not having food to feed them.

How about having someone over when you haven't had a date with your husband in three months and you feel like he's out to get you over every little thing. Getting into arguments in front of friends, or hashing out personal issues with one another on dates. It turns into a real disaster. And the fiasco continues the longer I live, all because I am afraid of planning ahead. It's easier to say everything went well when you didn't have any standard of excellence to meet in the first place. Oh yes, it was a nice date, we rehashed our church issues for most of it, but the desert was nice. Oh yes, it was a nice evening with friends, we did get into an argument that they felt they shouldn't be a part of, but we smoothed it over by storing our hurt feelings up for later. Oh yes, we had an excellent morning, we hollored all the way to church because we stayed in bed way too long to get there in time, and somebody isn't wearing shoes but at least our morning in bed was nice.

Yesterday evening, which by the way was the evening before my husband left for a week to the Yukon, I tried to tell him about how everything is just getting to be way too much. How I need to become a different person who is good at planning things and who in fact LIKES planning things in order to keep my marriage from crumbling and my life from being meaningless, and everything from always going wrong. I need to be someone else. I loathe making plans. It feels like slavery. And as I told him this, the lump in my throat got to be the size of a potato and I suddenly found I couldn't breathe. It was the beginning of a panic attack that I needed to get under control.

I was raised to never back out of my commitments, but what that has morphed into is, never make any commitments, then you don't have to back out of anything or do anything your don't really want to do. I uphold all my commitments, and I only commit when I really have to or really want to.

My husband had to wrangle me into committing to go to a 21 Pilots concert, because I had already made a commitment to nurse our son for 8 months and I am not shutting it down four months early just to go see a concert. I had to do that for the Coldplay concert, and you know, I wasn't pleased about that either, even though Dietrich had reached the eight months mark I had been shooting for. It makes my soul shrivel a little bit, canceling commitments, even ones I don't really enjoy.

I committed to take the kids to the parade last summer, and we stood outside in the drenching rain for two hours while the procession threw all our candy into a giant puddle accumulating on the road in front of our kids from the house behind us, whose sump pump kept belching out dirty brown water. By the time we left, our hands were so numb we couldn't feel them stinging anymore and the kids were all crying.

That is the equivalent of what a commitment is. It is something that could be nice, but generally turns out to have some rot attached to it in some way. It is the sort of thing you don't want to attach yourself to. And you know what, I get it. People get themselves into holes all the time by making too many commitments, then they cancel on you. I don't want to be that person.

Commitments are a big deal. Therefore, plans are a big deal. Therefore, my life is in shambles.

But as I mentioned earlier, it was Resurrection Sunday. And as I went about the day today, thinking about the complete fiasco that was yesterday as we unsanctimoniously left church because Nathan had to get to work and we missed the fellowship and all the kids were crying because they didn't get to eat any of the food or speak to any of their friends, and I was regurgitating all of the dirty water in my heart like that sump pump on the day of the parade, I remembered what my husband had said. It was just that many church people today are suffering in ways far worse and more inconvenient than that we hadn't planned ahead and taken two cars to church.

I don't usually compare my suffering to other people's suffering, because that starts you off down an overgrown path into a dark jungle of comparison where you can get lost for weeks on end, but yesterday was different. And the reason is this.

God not only planned to send Jesus Christ, His only Son as a sacrifice to once and for all pay for the sinful dirt in my soul, but He solidified it with commitments. Covenants for our good, at the cost of His own life. God isn't a liar. He doesn't commit and then back out. He never goes back on His word, He never makes mistakes. He never forgets. And His ultimate commitment to bring Salvation to the world and to renew the earth as He takes it back from the forces of darkness through the gardening that is discipleship and the watering that is baptism, is a plan from before the beginning until now. Never once did He feint, or have a panic attack about it, or lose heart even though He felt the crushing weight of His own plans. He remained true to Himself. He backed up His commitments with more commitments. And it was not a lose lose. It didn't end in His suffering and death. It didn't end in His ultimate failure. His plans are so immensely interwoven in every little fine detail of past, present and future, and His plans costed His comfort, and His life.

Jesus did something I could learn to do, and that is that in the middle of His suffering, He looked ahead to the prize. He kept His eyes fixed on the goal. Instead of being fixated on the fleeting pleasures and happiness of some moments, He was fixated on His enthronement on high, His restoration of this world, and the reason and purpose of His death, our Salvation and His glorification. The Resurrection of Christ we were meditating on and rejoicing over yesterday meant that I have eternal life in Christ. It meant that even though my plans are garbage and I forgot to wash everyones hair, and I didn't buy food because I didn't feel like it and now I'm panicking because I have to go shopping alone with five children under six, I am still safe. My soul is committed to His keeping.
My works are filthy rags, but I don't have to rely on them to earn God's favor. Having the Holy Spirit means that I can offer my rags with joy and gratitude instead of fear and shame. It means that I am free to stop panicking. I am free to learn generosity and kindness, I am free to reach for something better and to become something better than what I am. I am free to plan and fail and try again. I can take heart, take hope, take perseverance, take rain, take cold, take failure all to the foot of the cross, because Christ is my lifeline and my joy. I don't always wallow in misery at the foot of the cross, sometimes I bring offerings of thanksgiving. Though my righteousness is of no worth in accessing my Salvation, it is a pleasing aroma to my heavenly Father when it is offered as a free gift. The gift of a child, not worth much, but pleasing. It is all I have, and it was a gift I didn't even have yesterday, on the day we were celebrating the Resurrection of our Saviour and Hope. But I have it today, and I can say with all certainty that I'm sure grateful, and I can say with joy “Praise God! Because if it were up to me to earn my own Salvation, I would be damned, and that's a fact.”