We are truly creatures of habit.  We were intentionally created by God to live life in rhythms.  However, why is it that it is so hard to develop good and healthy habits, but so easy to develop bad ones?  Not only is it easy to develop bad habits, but they are incredibly challenging to break! 

Consider some of our almost humorous expectations in all of this, too!

We eat unhealthily for years, then we decide that it’s time to get healthy.  We go one day eating salads and then jump on the scale the next morning.  Why?  Do we really think that eating healthy for a day, or even a month, is going to instantly undo the unhealthy years beforehand?

We aren’t very quick to trust processes and aren’t very patient when it comes to the results that we desire.  We’re always looking for shortcuts in the name of efficiency and for hacks in the name of effectiveness.

This rings true too often not only in our natural life, but also in our spiritual lives.

We pray for God to work a miracle for us, based on one of His promises, and then figure, “Well, that didn’t work.” when we don’t see the breakthrough.  We accept it as God’s will, or even His discipline, despite what He actually says about it.  We radically change our theology of who God is based on our experience and circumstances instead of His word.

Not only is it challenging to stick with good habits and to kick bad ones, commitment is a struggle for us in general.

We have a bad experience at a store with an employee having a bad day and we vow to never shop there again and spread the news to our friends about that encounter.  We expect to receive freely and abundantly grace and forgiveness, but administer to others judgment and wrath when they fall short of our standards.

Perhaps the greatest test of commitment for many reasons is none other than the beautiful chaos that God created and called marriage where two lives become one.

There is a common statistic quoted that 50% of marriages today end in divorce.  Perhaps more alarming is that according to ourworldindata.org, marriage itself in the US is at its absolute lowest point in all of our history, dropping 50% since just the 1970’s and continuing to drop even after the legalization of same-sex marriage. 

The point?  We are very hesitant to commit, especially for life!

We live in a throw-away culture that values the new and shiny and is quick to simply throw out or trade in the old.  When something isn’t going the way that we want, when something is hindering our happiness, when something might let us down, we simply walk away from it. 

We don’t value long-term commitment and working through challenges and struggles.  When something is broke, we don’t invest the resources required to fix it, we use our resources instead to find a replacement.

Unfortunately, this mindset and attitude in life also hinders us from reaching our own full potential personally.  Our maturity and character is shaped and formed most often when we work through adversity and change to overcome our obstacles.  The path of least resistance is also the path of least growth and  transformation.

You may have heard the old adage that “the grass is greener on the other side.”  Well, this isn’t necessarily true. 

God created everything from the very beginning in such a way that the grass is always greener where the effort is put into taking care of it.  This was even the case before sin entered the picture and corrupted everything quite literally.

Genesis 2:5;7;15

5 Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, because the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, … 7 Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. 15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

From the very beginning of creation, God chose to