I’ve noticed there are people who catch on to what Jesus is up to more quickly and completely than me. They get the death-to-life thing, the rebirth, the salvation. They speak with confidence about their wholeness and joy, about Jesus and His ways, about life. Meanwhile, I mainly have a lot of questions, I don’t know what to tell my kids about God, and I’m still wondering what in heaven’s name brings about transformation and the fruit of the Spirit in a person’s life.

Over the last year, death has been a recurring theme in my journal. Not the stop-breathing kind of death, but the spiritual one. An awful lot of verses in the New Testament use death as an analogy for … well, I’m not sure what. Something spiritual. In the book of James, which I zealously underlined the entirety of as a teen, there’s this sin-leads-to-death verse: “But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.” (James 1:14, 15) As I read this poetic life-cycle illustration—conception, birth, growth, death—I wondered, Do I have desires that “draw me away”? Two came to mind: my desire to appear without fault to everyone (including, and maybe especially, myself); and my desire for life to be happy (or at least predictable). Have these desires conceived and given birth to sin? Heck, it sure feels like giving birth. Conceiving is the easy part. Giving birth is brutal. But, once conception happens, birth is inevitable.

I have enjoyed too much time in bed with a lot of lies, allowing my desire to be without fault to lead me to conceive and birth a child who reminds me every day of my indiscretion. This child is Judgement, Idolatry, Pride (defensiveness), Angry Outbursts at those who inconvenience me, and, well … a bit of Death.

Late last summer I noticed I had a pallor of death. I was seduced by my desires, blind to the fact they fed the lies I tried to stamp out. I made an effort to imprison the lie that my (and everyone’s) value is in productivity and performance, all the while tossing bread crusts into the prison cell. I fought with the sin-child I had conceived—who was growing rapidly—while still getting back in bed with desire.

The thing about dying is that it’s painful and we’d rather not look directly into it. It’s hard to watch death claim anything or anyone—especially when you have carried that thing in your very center for nine months and given birth to it. But when death does take place, there is a sense of finality. When I realize my desires are dead and I have been in bed with a zombie, when I stop tossing bread crusts to the skeletons in the prison cell, then Life leaps to my side almost as if it had been waiting. Words like “spring” and “abundance” move from Biblical vocabulary into experience.

“There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” Romans 8:1-2

My desire to be without fault has held me in constant condemnation. I have been in bondage to the “law of sin and death,” seeing myself as one giant aberration from righteousness. I have been living always in weakness, meditating continually on all the ways I fall short. I have made life-giving Jesus a sick joke. Hey, you know why Jesus died? Uh, for my sins? No, because God couldn’t legally kill you, so He killed His own Son. That is the voice of condemnation, of damning. Constant meditation on how I fall short siphons Life out of me, leaving me empty and dry. Jesus invites me to Love—a life unadulterated by the habit of constantly looking behind me, keeping tabs on my “progress” and the impression I leave behind.

Living with my mind preoccupied by circumstances—my physical and emotional experience (the desire for life to be smooth), worries about all my interactions with people (the desire to be without fault), and trying to get things right and be in control—is death. And when I say that, I don’t feel I have somehow been naughty for choosing death, but more a sense of relief at having a proper diagnosis. I have felt dead, going through days shackled and gray, a slave to my desires and impulses. I want to be alive.

One evening my husband, Michael, and I read together from Dr. Tim Kimmel’s book, Grace Based Parenting (pro tip: don’t read parenting books). The chapter was about the importance of secure love for children, and what secure love looks like. The next morning I wrote in my journal, “Not only am I a lot dead, I am also blind. I realize I let my kids get away with selfishness and meanness, but come down hard on them for normal kid (human) stuff like making messes or forgetting, because I am blind. If I saw clearly I would act differently.”

Every autumn we have an influx of flies in the house. They start out perky but gradually slow down until you can easily pick them up with your fingers. (I don’t recommend this. I picked one up thinking it was dead, and was scared half to death when it started buzzing in my fingers.) Often I’ll see flies lying upside down, randomly twitching. One morning as I sat praying, I noticed a fly on the windowsill, lying on its back, letting out a spastic buzzing every once in a while. And I thought, My life has been like this fly on the windowsill, alive … but not really. There is no shame in this; instead there is understanding, because that is exactly how I have felt. And just as I have authentically experienced being half-dead, I may authentically experience being fully alive. I was made for this.

“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be fleshly minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life und peace.” (Romans 8:5-6)