Desire for God

I've talked in a few of my blogs about my spiritual struggles here lately. I have been putting off writing this blog, but now that I am headed in the right direction and I've been able to look back and think about these things so that I can put them into words.

Towards the end of school, in particular the last 1-2 months of school, I was really struggling with my desire for God and wanting to do right. I found myself enjoying the company of people that weren't helping me grow in a positive way. I was drifting from God. I could totally relate to Paul in Romans 7:15. He says, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." It eventually became even worse than doing things I hated and not doing what I knew was right. Instead, I was wanting to go in the opposite direction intentionally. I wanted to do the wrong things. What I had known as wrong before didn't seem so wrong to me anymore. I didn't really care that my actions weren't glorifying God. I didn't care that the people I was spending time with were encouraging me to walk away from God. It wasn't that they were telling me to do wrong things, but they didn't have the same view on things that I previously held. So the things I once saw as having negative effects on someone spiritually, they didn't have a problem with. I found myself becoming distanced from close friends that were trying to steer me back in the right direction. I made excuses for my actions and left it at that. I had no desire to do the right thing at all. I had the most apathetic attitude that I've ever experienced in my life. I didn't care about my grades, my actions, my good friends, or my family. I just had this inner want to do all the wrong things. I feel like I've always been a "good" girl and this attitude was scaring even myself. I had no desire to even change my attitude. I just didn't care.

Good news. I didn't go off the deep end. I'm still here and am back running towards Christ now! I was struggling mostly with this sinful attitude and all these things when I was still in school. When I got out of school for the summer and was around new people who had a better influence on me and cared about where I was headed spiritually, things started to change. I think it was really church camp that helped me to see where I had gone wrong. I had lost my desire. Robbie taught an AWESOME lesson on spiritual growth. One of his main points was if we don't have a DESIRE for God and a DESIRE to grow spiritually, then we shouldn't expect growth to happen. Once school let out, I had kind of lost that apathetic "bad" girl type attitude. At that point, I just wasn't sure why I wasn't growing spiritually. In my mind, I should have been growing because I wasn't desiring to do wrong anymore, and I cared about my spiritual life. Wrong. Just because I'd lost my desire for those wrong things didn't mean that I had gained back my desire to go back into that intimate relationship with Jesus Christ. At church camp after this lesson, I realized that I needed to get this desire back if I were going to start growing again. This lesson affected me probably the most out of any that I heard that week.

Since that week I have had time to process what went on for those 2-ish months when I was so turned around in my faith. It's been hard to admit, but I was wrong. I was so wrong. And I'm lucky I didn't lose one of my closest friends in the process. I've prayed since then that I never have to go back through that and I'm trying to study the scriptures every day to guard myself from it happening again. I'm also surrounding myself with more positive influences now.

I can see now how when I slowly stopped reading my Bible and stopped praying regularly to God that this attitude slowly but surely developed. It just goes to show me how important it is to be immersed daily in God and his awesomeness. I still don't always do the right things, but now I have a desire for God again that I have missed. I'm hoping that anyone else who may have struggled this way or is currently struggling will find that desire fore Him they've been missing too.

Desiring Him,
Katelyn