Throwing up

|Catfish|
I spent the better part of last night "bowing to the porcelain God" as my friend Max would surely say. I hate being sick...I hate puking...I hate the other parts of being sick...but most of all, I hate losing control unwillingly. I like to put my feet up and watch a little TV at night, but I hate being strapped down to the couch by a stupid sickness. I like to be lazy when I want to be lazy, not because every time I try to get up, I nearly pass out. I like to be in control.

Control freaks like me know exactly what I'm talking about. And there are more of us than you are ready to admit. If you've ever cursed your bladder because you hadn't planned on a bathroom break, you might be a control freak. If you can't decide on a restaurant, but as soon as someone else suggests a good one, you come up with your own selection and then insist on it, you might be a control freak. If you resist change in your organization because you aren't on the leading edge of the change, you might be a control freak. If you are frustrated because you can't edit this Foxworthy reference out of my blog...you might be a control freak.

I'm not a good person when someone else tries to control me. Most of the time when I get upset, I remain in control as a means of feeding my ego (remember, I like to be in control). But when the thing that upsets me is someone controlling me, it's hard to find pride in allowing that to happen.


|Gospel|
For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.
~excerpts from Romans 7 & 8

Control is not mine. Paul makes it clear that I'm either being controlled by my sinful nature, or I'm being controlled by the Spirit. It's not mine to have. Jesus and I struggle to get this one figured out, because I want to be good, but I want to be the one who makes me good. I want to be responsible for my successes. I want to be praised for being good. But Jesus wants me to give all that up...to defer success and praise to him. I know that's how I ought to live, but my ego gets in the way. And the one thing I know he won't do is take control. He waits for me to give it to him. He knows how much I would hate him for taking it from me without asking...he knows me well enough to sit back and let me "control" what's going on until I realize I can't control my life without the Spirit anyway. I eventually make it back to a place of humility...it just depends how much I want to suffer first.