I couldn’t do it anymore. I was tired of pretending that everything was “okay”. I was tired of faking to have a good relationship with Jesus. I was tired of looking and acting like a good Christian girl. I was giving up… It had been a long hard 6 months. I was scared, lonely and tired of pretending. I wanted to run into my room, shut the door and never come out.

We all have times in our lives when we feel distant from God. We hold our feelings in because we are scared of feeling like a horrible person for not trusting that God is good all the time. We don’t even want God knowing about our lack of faith in Him. So we go on pretending until we are tired out and simply can’t pretend any longer.

When we go through seasons in our lives like this we feel like our hearts are breaking, or have already broken.

We coast along in life saying all the right things, going to Bible studies, ministering to friends who are brave enough to show that they need help, pray for others, and even forget about our hurt in order to be a good performer.

The problem we are having is an aftermath occurrence of our sin. Sin is like a volcano. It starts in the heart then boils over into our lives, and erupts into  a wave of disastrous effects that hits us at our core and effects others around us. This sin leaves us guilty and shameful. We feel horrible about ourselves and don’t like addressing the topic. We blame it on other things and other people.

In reality, we need to own up to it and call it out in our lives so that we no longer live in the dark condemning ourselves and trying to act okay. Fear of our sin takes control in our lives and we may not even notice it. We may wish for something so badly that we covet in our hearts wildly then feel terrible for not trusting God to make us happy.

We may have a recurring habit that we struggle to gain self-control over. The struggle becomes more and more painful and more and more embarrassing. We feel like a failure in the eyes of God and a fool in the eyes of others. Whatever the subject of sin may be we all feel the weight and effects of it. We know it’s there even though we try to cover it up with a fake front that becomes so natural over time we forget what made us that way in the first place.

Don’t you miss being a little girl? 

When I wrote a prayer the other day I was crying and told Jesus that I missed being little. I missed that innocent, day by day, little girl mindset. What made me lose sight of the goodness of life? The goodness of Jesus? The goodness of my parents being the only ones whose opinion mattered of me?

The world exposed it’s self to me, I held up a measuring stick of what I thought a good girl should be and ever since then I’ve tried to amount to it every day. When I fail I make myself feel like a failure. Does this sound familiar to you at all?

I think we all try to compartmentalize a part of our relationship with Jesus in some way or other. We think He doesn’t know when we are doubting His sovereignty, that He might not notice when we are angry at Him for something. We talk to Him about other things in our lives but we keep secret the things we don’t want Him to know that we are thinking; which is silly because of course He knows about that compartmentalized area of our life too.

Without even noticing that we are “verbally” thinking this way we forget one simple thing…find out what it is in this verse: “Acknowledge the God of your father, and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind, for the LORD searches every heart and understands every desire and every thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you…” 1 Chronicles 28:9

God knows everything! He sees every thought, hears every small doubt, He already knows your heart. 

Don’t be afraid to admit to yourself and to God that you’re scared, you don’t have self-control over sin or doubt. You can’t afford to keep God at arm’s length distance. He longs to be near to you, near to your heart, near to you in mind, thought, and deed.

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves when we are feeling tired of trying to always do the “right thing” that we are already made perfect, by the mercy of God, by the blood of Christ being poured into our lives. We already are godly. We are secure. We are brave. We are winners. We are conquerors! Everything we think we aren’t in the worlds eyes, in our friends eyes, or in our parents eyes, we ALREADY ARE in God’s eyes!

This verse in Titus blew my mind and changed my thinking pattern when I was tired of pretending to be the perfect Christian girl. Check it out!

“But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior…” Titus 3:4-6

We haven’t and can’t do anything to be a perfect (or even a somewhat perfect) Christian.

Jesus knows we fail and that we will go on failing. But He doesn’t care! All Jesus sees when He looks at us is His beautiful daughter or son. Nothing we can do or won’t do, will change that. Stop trying so hard then being discouraged when you fail. Remember that you are already godly. You are already beautiful, you are already enough. Sure we will be insecure sometimes and we won’t always be happy-go-lucky Christians but we can remind ourselves what Jesus has done for us and that He has completed His life and His righteousness in us. And that is always a good reminder.

Have you ever felt tired of trying to be a good example of a “Christian girl” before? I would love to hear from you. And remember: “He (God) made Him (Jesus) who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”  2 Corinthians 5:21