This Saturday morning is like any other. The alarm is silent but I wake up at 9, that’s unusually early for a Saturday. I run the list of things I should do in my head, clean the bathroom, wash my hair, maybe cook for the week – but not before I read my bible. I’m in the middle of pouring cold water on a bowl of garri when I remember that I’m supposed to be fasting. I lift the spoon I’m holding to my mouth anyway because it makes no difference now – that fast was supposed to have been from Tuesday to Saturday.

I finally make it back to my bed and splay the bible open on my lap. I’m reading through Titus this week, actually I’ve been reading Titus since last week and I’ve been on chapter 1 for just as long. It looks like I won’t be going any further today because my confusion has lunged me headlong into a 30 minute long monologue about Paul’s political incorrectness. How could he possibly make the generalization that all the Cretans are liars and lazy gluttons? How’s that okay? So that ends the bible reading for today. I make it over to Instagram to make an unimaginative birthday post for a friend. The biggest chunk of my day is spent hoping between Instagram and Facebook, stalking people I’ll probably never meet in real life. I look at the time and it’s 2:30 pm. I feel guilty and wonder how differently my day would’ve been had I spent time in prayer, trying to understand what Paul is actually saying.

Most of my days are like this. A list of shoulds that never materialize into actual dos. Roiling in guilt and then deciding that every bad thing that happens to me is because I didn’t do what I was supposed to have done. I stub my toe or feel a pimple raising its head and it’s because I didn’t spend enough time reading my bible. My ‘quiet time’ has become a barometer for deciding whether or not God is pleased with me, for gauging whether or not he’ll answer my prayers. So on days when I don’t get a full hour in the word, when my prayers sit in my mouth like chalk, unconvincing and bland to my own ears, I can imagine God sitting up on his throne looking at me with a sneer on his face, shaking his head as he looks through the list of misfortunes that are going to befall me because I didn’t pray hard enough to earn his protection from them.

I’ve made quite a stir about hating the “prosperity gospel.” I’ll march up and down and try to speak “sense” into people who think they’ll live long healthy and prosperous lives because of their faith, because they pray long prayers and speak in tongues. To them I say “Come on! Look at Jesus, look at Paul.” But I’m slowly realizing that a part of me still buys into the idea that I can bargain with God – that in exchange for cowries of good behavior, I’ll get to carry home bucketfuls of the kind of Christian life I want to live. The kind of life that’s not boring, that brims over with mountain top experiences and makes you immune to pain and the beckonings of earthly desire.

Dull days still stretch on endlessly though, and life trails in the kind of zigzag way that can’t be mapped neatly onto moralizing blog posts. Not everything makes sense, and even though I’m trying really hard to get to the place where I don’t desire things (because we all know the trick is to be so satisfied in him so that you don’t want them anymore– and then he’ll give them to you), I still have longings, petty and ever-evolving, weighty and at times all-consuming.

In a life at once full and unfulfilled, I’m learning that good behavior doesn’t warrant good reward. And I’ve heard a lot of pastors try really hard to drive home that point. But too many times I’ve heard well meaning teachers say, in an attempt to smother the legalistic tendencies that some of us have, that our righteous deeds don’t matter. That they mean nothing because we’re totally justified. And I disagree. I disagree because even though we’re saved through his mercy and not through any righteousness of our own (Titus 3:5) we’re called to live and walk in a manner worthy of our holy calling (Ephesians 4:1, Colossians 1:10), not because we can ever be deserving of our salvation but because we know him who’s called us. So while it goes without saying that keeping sacraments and checking off boxes doesn’t make us deserving of our salvation, there’s a place for striving to live a life that’s pleasing to God.

Anyway, flesh and blood business is complicated, and sometimes it can be glamorous to recline languidly in the ironic ever-wandering, never coming to any conclusion about what God wants kind of way. But I pray that the Holy Spirit will awaken us to the beauty of resting in God, knowing that nothing we do can earn us his grace, while making us a people who’re not passive about living in a way that’s pleasing to him.