On Tuesday I loved spring but then on Wednesday it actually came, and we almost broke up.
My morning run was pushed back in hopes of a break in the rain or even a tiny turning-down of the faucet. By 8:45 I realized it was not happening, that this rain was the Oregon kind and I just needed to put on my flippers and new "water repellent" jacket and go.
I plugged my nose and jumped off the front porch, just for dramatic effect.
On Wednesday all the things I'd said Tuesday came back with teeth, as if to bite:
Do you really love this time of year?
You talk a lot of flowery nonsense but how do you feel about all this now?
And how's that fancy new jacket working for you?
This is my normal modus operandi, to always question myself and accuse and check for hypocrisy, the ugliest of all character traits.
On Tuesday I waxed poetic about all I love about spring and how even the rain is a blessing. Tuesday it was beautiful and sunny and everything was right with the world and Wednesday, it was Oregon.
Big Time.
And I am realizing that not everything that looks and sounds like hypocrisy really is.
Sometimes, don't we just say the things we want to be true, the things that we know are good and right but hard to work into real life?
Is it hypocrisy to say whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger?
Because in the middle of those things that feel like they're killing me, what do I say?
In the middle of the torrential rain (which didn't kill me, by the way) am I thankful for spring?
And who really cares about rain but in the middle of the argument when I quote scripture and encourage love and talk all motherly and authoritative...am I being a hypocrite?
Are all those platitudes bearing plastic fruit in my life?
When I lecture and pontificate about godly communication and then run to my bedroom for solitude, am I taking the chicken's way out?
I think fruit comes through digging and toil and sun and rain, and the constant checking of myself can be just that. Cultivating.
It can also be condemnation, and to that I say enough. Enough introspection, enough preoccupation with self, enough heavy-burdened law keeping.
I conclude that saying what I know is true and then doing what I know is wrong is not always hypocrisy.
And that's kind of scary to say but those are the only words I have for it right now.
Sometimes I just do what I know I shouldn't. I still know what is right to do, and I still can tell you and mostly my children what the right thing to do is, but I just don't always do the right thing.
That's not very profound.
It's called struggle. Paul had it. I have it. You probably have it, too.
O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God--through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.
There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. {Rom 7:24 -8:1 NKJV}
So yes, I still love spring. My fancy new jacket is not-so-water-repellent but rather more sponge-like and that's ok, because it's blue and it was on sale and I like it. And I like the irony of a jacket labeled "water-repellent" when it really isn't, right after I said that I'm good with rain when I'm really not.
And yes, I will probably tell my kids to do things or not do things that I myself have not yet mastered, and I might spout some great advice here that is hard for me to take sometimes. That makes me human, not hypocritical.
It also lends itself to grace, and that's something I try to excel at.
Linking up with Imperfect Prose and #TellHisStory