Thoughts on becoming

“Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!"
Matthew 6:22-23

"Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned."
Matthew 12:33-37

I heard a quote once, and I can't remember where from. It goes like this:

"Right now you are becoming the person you are going to be for the rest of your life,"

or, put another way,

"Who I am is the result of the choices I have made."

I gave a talk on that in Elevate a few weeks ago and it tonight a conversation I had brought the thought to the fore in a big way. (Elevate is the name of the college ministry I help with at FRC. Sorry, no web page...yet, muahahaha)
Sometimes that's a really cool quote to keep in mind, especially when I'm on the verge of doing or saying something stupid (which, as my fiance can attest to, can happen quite frequently). It helps me to keep an awareness of this strong truth, that what I do and say matters, that my habits and routines form who I will be, and that the things I say and do now are either taking closer to the person God is forming in me, or farther away from it (Thanks toPastor Matt Miller for keeping that phrase in our collective sights each Tuesday night). A very cool quote indeed.


Tonight, though, it scared me.
Sometimes it's too easy to oversimplify and - especially - to judge when you're watching someone close to you make life-destroying decisions, but I believe that, handled rightly, can lend a certain amount of clarity about the kind of person you're dealing with.

The quote scares me, because I'm witnessing the end result of what happens when an individual makes the same kinds of choices over and over again, until the choices start to make them.
It's a wonderful principle when you've trained yourself in habits like discipline, selflessness, and concern for others.
It's horrifying when you witness the kind of Spiritual blindness that leads to the destruction of a marriage and suffering in the life of another, especially when it's justified by reasons like "he isn't romantic enough for me."
And he hasn't eaten for a week and barely sleeps and when he does it's because he's exhausted from crying.

The quote scares me, because this person has become who she is as a result of those choices. You can only justify darkness when you've been living in it so long that you've forgotten what light looks like.

The quote scares me, and those verses scare me, because this is my story.
Not the specific event, maybe not that bad (as far as surface-level things go, anyway), but the reality is that both her and I are broken, and all of us are capable of both great and terrible things. Not one of us is exempt from the need for the power of Christ to renew us on the inside.
I am just as capable of drifting far enough away so that up becomes down. All it takes is small steps away from the cross, short trips in the dark that become vacations from what I once knew to be right, so much wandering around in darkness that I forget what the light ever felt like.

Hearts can become calloused. Our choices matter.
And that's scary stuff.