I think I’ve been giving myself credit for sins I haven’t committed while completely ignoring the obedience I haven’t offered.
And that’s a nasty little revelation to have before you’ve even finished your coffee.
Because what do you mean I can spend an entire day not doing anything wrong and still be wrong?
What do you mean I can be a good person, have good intentions, love God, read my Bible, mind my business, pay my bills, love my husband, feed my dog, and STILL be sitting in disobedience?
Now, Lord.
Respectfully.
I thought we were doing pretty good.
I haven’t robbed anybody. I haven’t committed murder. I haven’t intentionally set anybody’s house on fire. And considering some of the things I’ve had to navigate in this lifetime, I feel like that should count for something.
But apparently, heaven isn’t operating on a point system where I receive extra credit for all the terrible things I could have done but didn’t.
And somewhere between Hebrews 11:6, Matthew 2, and Proverbs 6:9–11, I realized something that made me want to close my notebook and go back to bed.
I’ve been so focused on not doing wrong that I’ve neglected the responsibility of doing right.
And the worst part is that I’ve been calling it faithfulness.
I’ve been calling it maturity.
I’ve been calling it growth.
When sometimes, if I’m being completely transparent, it’s just been me doing enough to feel comfortable with myself without doing enough to actually change.
Whew.
Because it’s one thing to stop participating in things that are obviously destructive.
It’s another thing entirely to start participating in the life God is calling me to live.
And I think I’ve spent more time celebrating what I’ve stopped doing than examining what I still refuse to do.
James 4:17 says that whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for that person it is sin.
Well.
There goes my entire defense.
Because I had convinced myself that not sinning was better than not obeying.
Except refusing to obey what I know God has instructed me to do IS sin.
And I don’t know why that surprised me.
I suppose because I’ve always associated sin with doing something.
Something scandalous. Something obvious. Something that would make somebody clutch their pearls and call a prayer meeting.
But what about the apology I know I owe?
What about the conversation I keep avoiding?
What about the discipline I keep postponing?
What about the person I know I need to forgive?
What about the responsibilities I keep pushing into tomorrow because today feels inconvenient?
What about the instructions God has already given me that I’m still treating like suggestions?
Because I can spend all day congratulating myself for not doing something wrong while ignoring the fact that I haven’t done what was right.
And that’s where God met me this morning.
Not with a list of everything I’ve done wrong.
But with a question I couldn’t shake.
Are you doing enough of what you know is right?
And girl, I wanted to change the subject.
Immediately.
Because I know how to defend myself against accusations.
I know how to explain my intentions.
I know how to provide context.
I know how to tell somebody why I responded the way I did, why I needed more time, why something was difficult, why I wasn’t ready.
I have a degree in explaining myself at this point.
Minor in overthinking.
Concentration in making a perfectly reasonable argument for why I should be allowed to remain exactly where I am.
But how do you defend yourself against a question you already know the answer to?
You don’t.
You sit there.
And you let God deal with you.
Hebrews 11:6 tells me that without faith it is impossible to please God. Whoever approaches Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.
And I had to sit with the difference between believing God exists and actually believing Him enough to live differently.
Because I’ve never really struggled with believing that God is real.
I’ve struggled with trusting Him when His instructions don’t make sense to me.
I’ve struggled with trusting Him when obedience requires me to release control.
I’ve struggled with trusting Him when the thing He’s asking me to do might disappoint somebody I love.
And I’ve definitely struggled with trusting Him when He doesn’t give me the entire plan.
Because I want faith.
But I also want details.
I want obedience.
But I would appreciate a little reassurance.
I want to surrender.
But I would prefer to review the terms and conditions first.
And I realized that my faith has become exceptionally good at responding to emergencies.
When everything is falling apart, baby, I know how to find Jesus.
I can pray.
I can fast.
I can cry out.
I can stand on scripture.
I can remind myself of every promise God has ever made.
But what happens when everything isn’t falling apart?
When the house is peaceful?
When my marriage is experiencing good days?
When my mind isn’t racing?
When I’m not trying to figure out how to survive the next twenty-four hours?
Do I still pursue God with the same intentionality?
Or have I become so accustomed to meeting Him in the middle of a crisis that I sometimes forget He’s supposed to be leading me through the ordinary days too?
Because my faith cannot keep being a response to catastrophe.
It has to become a way of life.
And that means my faith has to move.
Not just move mountains.
Move ME.
My perspective.
My priorities.
My decisions.
My reactions.
My relationships.
My habits.
Because what good is it to believe God can change my circumstances if I refuse to allow Him to change the person living inside them?
Then I got to Matthew 2:13–15.
And this is where things started getting personal.
An angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt because Herod is going to search for the child to kill Him.
Joseph gets up in the night, takes his family, and leaves.
That’s it.
No argument recorded.
No request for clarification.
No asking whether they could wait until the morning because packing up a baby in the middle of the night sounds incredibly inconvenient.
He moved.
And I’m reading this thinking, Joseph, sir, you are a better listener than I am.
Because I would have had questions.
Several.
Where exactly in Egypt?
For how long?
Are we coming back?
And why do I have to leave when Herod is the one with the problem?
Because that’s how I think sometimes.
Why should I have to adjust my life because somebody else is behaving badly?
Why should I have to establish boundaries because somebody else refuses to respect them?
Why should I have to change how I respond when I’m not the person who started the problem?
And sometimes those are valid questions.
But sometimes I’m so busy arguing about what should be fair that I’m not paying attention to what God is telling me to do.
Joseph didn’t create Herod’s insecurity.
He wasn’t responsible for Herod’s violence.
But he was responsible for responding to God’s warning.
And that hit me.
Because I have spent a significant portion of my life trying to figure out how to make people understand that I’m not a threat.
Trying to prove that I have good intentions.
Trying to demonstrate that I’m trustworthy.
Trying to be so loving, so patient, so accommodating, and so understanding that nobody could possibly justify treating me poorly.
And I’ve learned something.
My goodness will never change a Herod’s character. It will reveal it.
Now THAT one.
That one made me put my pen down.
Because I have spent years believing that if I could just love somebody correctly, they would eventually respond correctly.
If I could be patient enough.
Understanding enough.
Forgiving enough.
If I could explain myself clearly enough.
If I could demonstrate that I wasn’t trying to hurt them.
Maybe they would finally see me for who I was.
But Herod wasn’t responding to anything Jesus had done.
He was responding to what he feared Jesus represented.
Herod was so consumed with protecting his position that the existence of another king became a threat.
And that’s when I wrote something else in my notes.
I will be led by what I’m full of.
Herod was full of fear.
Full of insecurity.
Full of suspicion.
And those things influenced the way he responded to the people around him.
But then I had to ask myself something.
What am I full of?
Because it’s easy to recognize when somebody else’s insecurity is controlling their behavior.
It’s a whole different conversation when I have to recognize mine.
When I’m full of fear, I can interpret silence as rejection.
When I’m full of resentment, I can hear criticism in conversations where none was intended.
When I’m full of insecurity, I can interpret somebody else’s success as evidence that I’m falling behind.
And when I’m full of abandonment wounds, even a small disagreement can feel like somebody is preparing to leave.
I’ve done that.
I’ve anticipated disappointment before it arrived.
I’ve rehearsed conversations that never happened.
I’ve responded to what I thought somebody meant instead of what they actually said.
And I’ve called it discernment when sometimes it was fear.
Not every time.
But enough times that I need to be honest about it.
Because I can’t keep asking God to heal my relationships while allowing old wounds to interpret every new interaction.
And I can’t keep expecting people to respond to the healed version of me when I’m still allowing the wounded version to make all the decisions.
But I also cannot keep taking responsibility for changing somebody else’s character.
My love cannot do their internal work.
My patience cannot make them accountable.
My goodness cannot force them to become safe.
And my willingness to endure something doesn’t make it holy.
Sometimes all my goodness does is reveal what somebody chooses to do with grace.
And I have to be willing to believe what their choices show me.
Not because people can’t change.
They can.
I’ve changed.
I’m still changing.
But I cannot keep making myself responsible for producing somebody else’s transformation.
That’s God’s work.
And their responsibility to respond to Him.
Mine is to obey.
And sometimes obedience looks like moving.
Sometimes it looks like establishing a boundary.
Sometimes it looks like having a difficult conversation.
Sometimes it looks like forgiving somebody without giving them the same access they once had.
And sometimes it looks like giving somebody over to God because I’ve finally accepted that I cannot love them into becoming somebody they are unwilling to be.
Then I got to Proverbs 6:9–11.
And if Matthew 2 confronted my relationships, Proverbs 6 came directly for my habits.
“How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep?”
Now first of all.
Why are we yelling?
It’s early.
But the passage continues by describing a little sleep, a little slumber, and a little folding of the hands to rest, followed by poverty arriving.
And I know the passage is warning about laziness and neglected responsibility, not condemning people who genuinely need rest or suggesting that poverty is always a personal failure.
But what stood out to me was the gradual nature of the neglect.
A little sleep.
A little slumber.
A little folding of the hands.
Not one enormous decision.
Just a series of small ones.
And I started thinking about how often I’ve allowed things to remain undone simply because nothing terrible has happened yet.
How often have I postponed something I know needs attention?
How often have I told myself I’ll get serious about a habit next week?
How often have I waited for the perfect conditions before doing something I already know is right?
And then I asked myself the question that started this entire morning.
Am I doing anything wrong?
Maybe not.
But am I doing enough of what is right?
Because there’s a difference.
A BIG difference.
I can go an entire day without being unkind to my husband.
But did I intentionally love him?
Did I consider him?
Did I listen?
Did I make room for his needs without abandoning my own?
I can go an entire day without making an irresponsible financial decision.
But did I do anything to improve my stewardship?
Did I plan?
Did I prepare?
Did I consider whether the resources God gave me today might be needed tomorrow?
I can go an entire day without saying something hurtful.
But did I speak life into anybody?
Did I encourage somebody?
Did I apologize where I needed to?
Did I have the conversation I’ve been avoiding?
I can go an entire day without doing anything obviously sinful.
But did I obey?
Because I’ve been so focused on avoiding the things I shouldn’t do that I’ve sometimes neglected the things I should.
And Proverbs 6 reminded me that neglect has consequences.
Not always immediately.
Not always dramatically.
Sometimes things deteriorate slowly.
A little distance in a relationship.
A little inconsistency in my habits.
A little irresponsibility with my money.
A little compromise in my discipline.
A little avoidance in my spiritual life.
And eventually, I look around wondering how I got so far from the life I said I wanted.
But I didn’t get there all at once.
I got there one little decision at a time.
And that made me think about Menace II Society.
Now, I’m from Los Angeles.
So that movie has always hit differently for me.
Because when you grow up around certain environments, certain behaviors, certain ways of thinking, they don’t always register as unusual.
They’re just life.
You learn the rules.
You learn what to watch for.
You learn how to read people.
You learn how to survive.
And Caine knew how to survive the world he grew up in.
He understood the environment.
He understood the people.
He understood the expectations.
But knowing how to survive somewhere doesn’t mean you know how to leave it.
And that’s what makes his story so heartbreaking.
Because Caine had opportunities to imagine something different.
Ronnie represented a different future, a chance to leave Los Angeles and build another kind of life.
But wanting a different life and being willing to make different decisions are not the same thing.
And I started thinking about my own life.
I left Los Angeles when I was twenty-five.
Moved to Louisiana.
Different state.
Different environment.
Different everything.
And yet, there were things I carried with me that no moving truck could have packed.
The fear.
The hyper-independence.
The people-pleasing.
The need to prove I was worthy of being loved.
The instinct to anticipate rejection.
The tendency to believe that if I could just become strong enough, independent enough, and useful enough, nobody would ever have the power to hurt me again.
Because moving locations doesn’t automatically mean you’ve moved mentally.
And sometimes you can leave the environment that taught you how to survive while continuing to live by every rule it taught you.
I knew how to survive chaos.
I knew how to function through grief.
I knew how to keep going when things were falling apart.
But peace?
Peace required a different skill set.
Healthy relationships required a different skill set.
Trust required a different skill set.
And I had to learn that the habits that helped me survive one season could become the very things preventing me from thriving in another.
Because sometimes the most dangerous thing isn’t what is unfamiliar.
It’s what has become so familiar that I no longer question whether it’s healthy.
Caine’s story is tragic because the world he knew and the choices he continued making eventually caught up with him.
And I don’t want that to be my story.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life recognizing that something needs to change while refusing to make the decisions that would allow it to.
I don’t want to be so comfortable with familiar dysfunction that I mistake peace for danger.
And I don’t want to keep asking God for a different life while bringing the same patterns into every new season.
Because I can move across the country.
I can change jobs.
I can change relationships.
I can change environments.
But if I refuse to change the way I think, respond, and make decisions, I can recreate the very circumstances I was trying to escape.
And that’s not always somebody else’s fault.
Sometimes it’s mine.
Not the wounds.
Not the things that happened to me.
But the responsibility I have now to stop allowing those things to govern my future.
And that requires me to be honest about what I’m full of.
Because if I’m full of fear, I’ll keep making fear-based decisions.
If I’m full of resentment, I’ll keep responding from resentment.
If I’m full of insecurity, I’ll keep interpreting everything through insecurity.
But if I’m allowing God to develop faith in me, faith should begin influencing how I live.
Not just how I pray.
And then there’s provision.
Because I’ve spent enough time asking God for more that I need to start asking whether I’m being responsible with what He’s already given me.
More peace.
More money.
More time.
More opportunities.
More emotional capacity.
But what if the extra He’s giving me in this season is preparation for something I’ll need in another?
What if the financial breathing room isn’t simply an invitation to spend more?
What if the quiet season isn’t an invitation to fill every available space?
What if the opportunity I’ve been praying for requires discipline I haven’t developed yet?
Because God deposits.
I develop.
He provides.
I steward.
And sometimes the blessing isn’t simply having more.
Sometimes it’s learning how to manage what I already have.
That applies to my finances.
My time.
My relationships.
My emotional energy.
And even my peace.
Because I cannot keep giving away everything I have and then wondering why I have nothing left.
I can love people without becoming responsible for their every emotion.
I can support people without making their problems my permanent assignment.
I can be generous without exhausting myself.
And I can be faithful without being endlessly available.
That doesn’t make me selfish.
It makes me responsible.
But accepting responsibility also means confronting the places where I genuinely have been selfish.
The places where I want God’s promises without His process.
Where I want growth without correction.
Where I want healthy relationships without difficult conversations.
Where I want discipline without inconvenience.
Where I want faith without uncertainty.
And where I want obedience to remain optional whenever it interferes with what I prefer.
Because I can make a very convincing argument for why I should be allowed to remain comfortable.
I’ve been through enough.
I’ve carried enough.
I’ve survived enough.
And those things are true.
But they cannot become permanent excuses for refusing to grow.
I deserve rest.
I deserve compassion.
I deserve healthy relationships.
And I am still responsible for participating in the life God is helping me build.
Both things can be true.
Then I thought about Joseph again.
Because Joseph wasn’t given the entire plan.
He was told to go to Egypt and remain there until God told him otherwise.
And I realized that sometimes faith requires me to manage the tension of an unclear timeline.
To hold on to the last word until I receive the next one.
To continue doing what is right even when I don’t know how long the season will last.
And sometimes to move forward without closure.
Without an apology.
Without an explanation.
Without everybody understanding my decision.
Because I have spent too much time waiting for things to make sense before giving myself permission to move.
Waiting for people to understand.
Waiting for circumstances to improve.
Waiting for the perfect moment.
Waiting until I feel completely ready.
But what if readiness isn’t the requirement?
What if obedience is?
And what if the next chapter of my life doesn’t begin when everything becomes clear?
What if it begins when I finally respond to what God has already made clear?
I think about Joseph.
I think about Herod.
I think about Caine.
And I think about myself.
Herod was led by what he was full of.
Caine struggled to leave a life that had become familiar.
Joseph moved when God instructed him to move, even without knowing the entire plan.
And me?
I’ve spent enough of my life trying to survive what I should have been learning to leave.
I’ve spent enough time explaining my intentions to people who were committed to misunderstanding them.
I’ve spent enough time confusing my goodness with the ability to change somebody else’s character.
I’ve spent enough time allowing fear to make decisions that should have been made by faith.
And I’ve spent enough time congratulating myself for not doing wrong while neglecting the responsibility of doing right.
I’m not pretending I’ve mastered any of this.
I haven’t.
I still get scared.
I still overthink.
I still want answers.
I still want closure.
I still occasionally want God to provide a detailed itinerary before I agree to the journey.
And sometimes I still catch myself reaching for old habits before remembering that I’m not the same woman I used to be.
But I am learning.
I’m learning that faith isn’t simply believing God can move mountains.
Sometimes faith is allowing Him to move the things inside me that have become mountains.
The fear.
The resentment.
The insecurity.
The apathy.
The need for control.
The habit of postponing obedience until it’s convenient.
Because I don’t want to be a woman who knows every scripture about faith but refuses to take the next step.
I don’t want to be so proud of the sins I’ve avoided that I become indifferent to the obedience I’ve neglected.
I don’t want to spend my life identifying everybody else’s dysfunction while refusing to confront my own.
I don’t want to keep trying to change Herod when God has already instructed me to move.
And I don’t want to become so comfortable with survival that I never discover what intentional living looks like.
I left Los Angeles years ago.
But there are parts of the life I learned to survive that I’ve had to keep leaving ever since.
And maybe that’s what moving differently really means.
Not simply changing where I am.
But changing what I allow to lead me.
Not simply avoiding what is wrong.
But intentionally pursuing what is right.
Not simply asking God to change my circumstances.
But surrendering the parts of myself that keep resisting His direction.
Because my faith cannot remain something I activate only when life becomes unbearable.
It has to become the way I live when life is peaceful, ordinary, uncertain, disappointing, and everything in between.
And I’m realizing that the greatest tragedy wouldn’t be that I never knew another life was possible.
It would be knowing God was calling me into something different and spending the rest of my life defending my right to remain the same.
So I’m moving different.
Not because I’ve forgotten where I came from.
But because I remember exactly what it cost me to stay there.
Not because I think I’m better than anybody.
But because I finally understand that knowing better creates a responsibility to do better.
And not because I’m trying to earn God’s love.
But because I believe Him enough to let His love change how I live.
I’m no longer measuring my faith by how many terrible things I managed not to do today.
I’m asking whether I actually did what God placed in front of me.
Because I can avoid every obvious sin, maintain every respectable appearance, and convince everybody around me that I’m doing just fine.
But if I know what God has instructed me to do and deliberately refuse to do it, I haven’t found a loophole in obedience.
I’ve found a comfortable way to remain disobedient.
And I refuse to spend another season calling that faithfulness.
God deposits.
I develop.
God provides.
I steward.
God directs.
I obey.
And when He tells me to move, I’m not asking the life that almost destroyed me for permission to leave.
I’m getting up.
Because I know what it means to survive.
I know what it means to endure.
I know what it means to make it through things I never imagined I’d face.
But now I want to know what happens when I stop making survival the goal and start making obedience the standard.
I don’t want to reach the end of my life with a long list of things I didn’t do wrong and a longer list of things God called me to do that I never did.
Because the question was never just whether I stayed out of trouble.
The question is whether I walked in purpose.
And this morning, God didn’t just challenge me to stop doing wrong.
He challenged me to get up and start doing right.
So yes.
I’m moving different.
Because the most dangerous place I can remain isn’t always the environment God brought me out of.
Sometimes it’s the version of myself I’ve become so comfortable with that I refuse to let Him change her.
And I’m not letting the woman I had to become to survive keep standing in the way of the woman God is teaching me how to be.
I survived the old life.
Now I intend to obey my way into the new one.