The LORD your God, the LORD is One: It's a process

I have a longstanding relationship with patience. It is not a healthy one. Patience is always nagging me, and I'm always telling patience to stop talking. If we were two people in a relationship, we'd need counseling. However, Deuteronomy 6:4-9 calls me to reconcile my broken relationship with patience. Following God, it seems, is a process. In waking, sleeping, traveling, staying home, having a family, on my doors and gates, faith is a process that is fairly consuming. This means, if I am truly to believe it, that I am on a pathway that leads closer and closer to God. Perhaps nobody reading this today struggles with shame, but I do. When I make mistakes, I think to myself "Why can't I be better than this!?!" Believe me, it's not helpful. I see my mistakes and disobedience as completely bad and as things that lead me farther from God. But are they? If it is true that my errors lead me away from God, then I am usually one step forward, two steps back. I'm farther from God than when I first began! But if my sin, my errors and my mistakes can be used to draw me closer to God, then everything's different. Then I can celebrate my learning, I can celebrate God calling me to a higher place- a better place. I can celebrate that God draws near to me in those times and, through the Holy Spirit, speaks clearly into my life at those times. Christians over the centuries have practiced various kinds of confession- and sometimes confession leads us to the guilty places and makes us feel that we are drifting farther and farther from God. Imagine if confession looked like this, "God, today I celebrate that in spite of my impatience, you teach me that you have a plan and that to you a day is a thousand years. Thank you for the grace to make this mistake and the encouragement to live life differently." This still takes our disobedience seriously- since we recognize that there is a cost to disobedience. And it takes forgiveness seriously- since we recognize that God is more interested in our growth than our guilt. What do you think?