Understanding Didn't Help

"...I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do..." - Romans 7:15

One thing on your list today matters. Not the urgent one or the loud one, the one you came back to last night and swore you would not let slide. You sit down, look right at it, and feel the small turn toward the email, a second cup, the drawer that suddenly needs sorting. You are aware of each pull, and you ignore them anyway.

Stay with what just happened, the second when you saw that one thing and reached past it. You saw what you needed to do, and the seeing, by itself, changed nothing.

Paul, one of the early followers of Jesus, knew that kind of moment, looking at what he meant to do and doing the opposite, and he wrote it down plainly. "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do," Romans 7:15. He's not confessing a weakness so he can solve it. He sits in the gap between what he wanted and what he did, letting it hold. He returns to the same gap a few verses later, "For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out," Romans 7:18. A man who had read Scripture his whole life, whose own words confess not a failure of knowing, but a failure of knowing, in itself, to be enough.

There is a truth underneath this dilemma that is not always easy to face. The lie we have been carrying is not that we are weak. The lie is that if we could study ourselves well enough, we would finally act on what we see. We read about procrastination, refine our plans, study our own patterns, and yet nothing changes. What if the pull is not evidence that something is wrong with us, but that the means we have been using will not carry what we ask of them? We are not failing, we are being shown what was never going to work, and that finding is itself a kindness done for us and not by us.

Which leaves a question to be asked. Has understanding ourselves ever been what gets us to do what we planned? No answer is needed today, only a willingness to stop asking your understanding to be what guides you. The next time you feel that pull, ask, without the right words, for help you cannot yet identify. That asking is a different posture than trying to think your way through, and it is being met by something true, a life sustaining the one you have been trying to carry by depending on your own strength. What is true here does not need to be fully understood today. Stay with this.

Prayer

Father, loosen our grip on what we see, and meet us with what we cannot yet ask for. Amen.