Sloths and Salvation

It has been a really long time since I've actually blogged. Sometimes, I thought about how I should probably keep a record of what God has been teaching me but then I realized that the real reason why I wasn't blogging was because I wanted to keep God at a distance and avoid the painful process of reviewing my trek up the mountain of faith (*thank you Doug for that metaphor*).
For my Nineteenth Century Best-Sellers seminar, we are currently reading a book called The Wide, Wide World by a woman named Susan Warner. This book is about a young girl named Ellen who is forced to go from relative to relative but remains true to the precepts of the Christian faith that her mother instilled in her before her death. It describes in minute detail Ellen's struggles to repress her own desires and become more like Christ.
While I am certain that my professor did not intend for anyone to reap spiritual material from the book, it has caused a revival in my faith in that it has shown me what true Christianity looks like. It's a daily process of denying yourself and serving others. That servanthood is, as Jesus professed when he washed the disciples' feet, the only true way to happiness (see John 13).
I've imbibed all the principles of Christianity without understanding that it's more than just knowledge. I guess I've told myself this truth and I've vowed to "spend more time with God" but I don't want it to become a mechanical routine. I want to hunger and thirst for the Bible. Today, possibly for the first time, that happened. I truly hungered for God's word in a way that I've never felt before. I got tired of reading about Ellen reading the Bible and I wanted that same experience for myself. I just felt drained and a bit depressed after a text conversation with a friend this morning, like I was being strangled actually and couldn't fully breathe in. It was as if I had received a piece of really bad news and all the anxiety that I had pushed to the side was choking me.
The source of this anxiety had nothing to do with the conversation but everything to do with the state of my soul. I know when people bring up their soul, what follows is often a bunch of metaphysical mumbo jumbo that I couldn't even attempt to understand. I'll try to keep it simple here: my soul felt sick and I knew that the only solution for it was the Bible. In WWW, John 10 is brought up quite frequently so I knew that my search had to start there. This chapter referred to Jesus as the "Good Shepherd" and I knew immediately that these words had more resonance for me at that moment than they had possibly ever had before. I'm not saying that I wasn't saved before--I don't actually even want to touch on that subject. I am, however, saying that I sat down on the floor in the family room of my house and prayed that God would send His Helper to fill me up. He revealed to me then exactly why I was feeling so miserable. I had been incredibly cruel to some people who love me and care about me. This cruelty is not always openly manifested but it still infects my heart, slowly poisoning all my good intentions. In WWW, whenever characters call Ellen "good", she emphatically responds to them by saying that she is not good! I feel the same way. Appearances can be so deceiving. It's so easy to put on the Christian facade while your inner self decays and rots, lacking the renewing power that only the Holy Spirit can provide.
You're probably wondering why I mentioned sloths in the title of this post. One of the ways in which my bitterness leaked out was through attacking things that my friends were fond of, like sloths. Now, with my Helper, I'm going to learn to love sloths in all their absurdities and despite my own self. My plea is the same as John the Baptists was, let Him increase so that I may decrease. Amen.