Gratitude for Bad Habits?

An FB friend expressed gratitude for bad habits.

Interesting thought, isn't it? Bad habits waste our time and other resources, cause friction with family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, etc., cost us pain, heartache, and anguish.

I don't know what habits she was thinking of, but I think I have an idea what she means.

Paul mentions a thorn in his side, and he talks about glorying in infirmities. We can read that several ways.

Like any human, I have a number of bad habits. Among other things, I tend to pay too much attention to detail, and when I don't I tend to be too willing to just let things ride. And I also have a bad habit of getting down on myself when I don't measure up to what I think people expect of me.

There is a bad habit that cost me my relationship with the first woman I was engaged with. 

Maybe it was just as well. Even though she was an English-speaking American and we ostensibly shared our religion and a number of interests, she would have had at least as hard a time understanding me as the woman I married.

Some bad habits are actual bad habits. 

 Others are not so much bad habits as aspects of our personality that somebody decides to complain about.

Trying to overcome bad habits can make us stronger.

Trying to overcome our own personality traits that some people decide to complain about can bring us face-to-face with God, if we try hard enough that He has to tell us to knock it off. 

Isaiah 55 has some interesting things to say. One of those is how God's ways are higher than ours, and His thoughts are higher than ours.

If you think about it, mortal humans have no hope to ever know much about much. Even as a group, our technologies, histories, cultures, everything we do tends to fall apart well before we can amass much knowledge, even about ourselves. 

Mortality means we can only get closer to perfection than we have been in the past. At the end of the day, we aren't much closer, and even at the ends of our lives, we fall short of perfection. 

God's ways and thoughts excel ours. Since our understanding is based on our thoughts, even our understanding of God's thoughts and ways falls short.

One thing we tend to ignore is that this means even our ideals fall short.

If you can't accept that, let me ask you to pick an ideal and explain it to me without resorting to your imperfect understanding and mine.

All of our ideals fall short of the glory of God.

Does this mean ideals are bad? No, not really. They are useful for pushing us forward, pushing us to do and be better.

But there comes a time to see where each ideal falls short of the glory of God, find better ideals, and move beyond the old ones.

This is where bad habits come in.

Bad habits are generally what we do in response to something we should be doing or getting but aren't.

Maybe we see green leaves on vegetables as non-ideal. They have a stronger taste, and they tend to be the outer leaves, so they tend to pick up dirt, pesticides, and agricultural chemicals. In our limited ideals, we throw them away.

And then we end up lacking certain B vitamins. And we develop certain bad habits, say overeating, or using tobacco, beer, coffee, etc., trying to stave off the need for those vitamins.

We use our willpower to quit those habits, but it's not enough. Until we figure out what our bad habits are trying to compensate for, the bad habits keep coming back.

So the bad habits can help us figure out where our ideals fall short, help us to find better ways to meet our real needs.

Paul's thorn in the flesh, which he talks about in 2 Corinthians 12, is often explained as a reference to pride and humility. But it's not just for abstract humility.

#GiveThanks