Little Victories: #2

Victory #2: “Let no sin have dominion over me.”

We moved a little over a year ago. Ian was working sixty hours every week, and I was teaching a couple classes at the community college, and our girls were one and three years old. I thought the girls would have trouble transitioning to a different bedroom and household, yet for the most part they did fairly well.

I did not.

Ian was working so many hours that it was a struggle to get things unpacked and put away. He would help when he could, but I was home most of the time, managing the day-to-day stuff and caring for the kids and making decisions about where things should go. By nature, I am not a decisive person. It’s not that I can’t think of possibilities; it’s that I can think of several, all the time, for every decision, and I want to make the best one. Perfectionism is good for activities like editing. It is not good for household organization (at least when you’re not good at it).

So I made tons of decisions, in addition to all the little decisions made by me as a parent every day. The boxes and clutter in the apartment were driving me crazy. I was having a hard time, and was already frustrated by Ian working so many hours every day. And then… Alexandra got an attitude.

I’d heard it’s common for three-year-olds to test their parents; I was being consistently tested every day. She didn’t want to listen and obey; she didn’t want to be kind to her sister; she liked talking back to me and mocking me; she liked making huge messes and not helping to clean them up; she wouldn’t eat her food, which wouldn’t have been a big deal except that when she didn’t eat, she got even more grouchy and naughty afterwards. 

Also, looking back at my journals, I think that I was slightly depressed at the time and just didn’t realize it.

The combination of everything made me feel frazzled and harried all the time, and I started to lose my temper a lot. I would snap and yell at her, and though, by God’s grace, I’ve said very few things to my children that I regret, my tone and expression and my whole body, quivering with frustration, were terrible displays of how to handle anger.

It’s not that, in many cases, I didn’t have a right to be displeased with Alexandra’s attitude and behavior. She was genuinely being naughty. However, my response to it was completely inappropriate. I was out of control, angry every day, and throwing grown-up fits in front of my kids. Worse, I didn’t know how to stop. It’s true, I was feeling sorry for myself. But putting a halt to the pity party is easier when you have some time to regroup, to be away, to think and pray, and there was no time for that. I was too tired at night and I couldn’t get up early enough in the morning (my kids get up REALLY early). I would pray in the mornings that I would be patient that day, but somehow in the anger and frantic frustration of the moment, I would lose my temper again.

I think God helps lead us out of sin in different ways in different situations. Usually, when I think of conquering a specific sin, I think of prayer and self-control, of trying harder to be aware of what I’m doing. But this time, what God gave me was a verse.

I was reading in the Psalms one day and praying through my anger issues, and a particular verse stood out to me:

“Keep steady my steps according to your promise,

And let no iniquity get dominion over me.” —Psalm 119:133 (ESV)

Sometimes you are reading the Bible, and you really experience it as God’s living Word. That verse cut through all the circumstances and issues surrounding my anger and make me realize that although my sin had many effects, the deepest problem was that there was a particular sin, an emotion deep within, that was dominating me. I was unable to control my anger.

Anger in itself is not a sin, depending on why we are angry and how we handle it. In my case, the reason and the handling of it were sinful.

And here is where the gift of God lay, in that situation: God used His Word to help me defeat my sin. The verse that jumped out and cut right to my heart stuck in my mind for the next several days: “…let no iniquity get dominion over me.” More than just not wanting to yell at my kids in anger, I didn’t want any emotion to control my behavior. That verse got to the root of my issue and voiced a simple prayer. And I didn’t have to pray with more words or different words, and I didn’t have to exert superhuman levels of self-control. Those were not the solutions to my sin this time. Rather, throughout the day, every day, whether I was angry or not, that one verse echoed through my thoughts: “… let no iniquity get dominion over me.” It was a very spiritual experience, like His Word was communing with His Spirit inside me and they were working together to manage my actions. I honestly had to exert very little conscious self-control; it was like repeating the verse over and over renewed my mind and transformed my outward behavior, like it says in Romans. For that reason, referring to this as a "victory" seems inaccurate, unless I am referring to God's victory working in me.

I wish I would remember to do this more often, when I am facing challenges. While it’s good to pray and exert personal effort, to bring my struggles to God, it’s probably better to listen to what God has already told me in the Bible. If my actions come from my thoughts and my thoughts are dominated by my spiritual life, then letting God’s Word shape my spiritual life is probably the most important step of all to conquer sin.

And it’s not like I’ve lived a sin-free life ever since, or haven’t lost my temper here or there. But God helped me defeat that particular pattern of sinfulness that was taking over that season of my life, and, thank God, while I struggle with other things, that one hasn’t come around to dominate me since.