Bad Habits

Hebrews 12:1–14

My old habits never announced themselves. That was the problem. Pressure came, and my hand reached for the drug before my mind had finished the thought. An obstacle came at work, and anger reached for my tongue. Someone of a different calibre walked into the room, and pride reached for my chin. At the point of inflection I was always too engaged to see what I was doing to the people in front of me. I only saw it afterwards, in the wreckage.

Hebrews names these things with uncomfortable precision: "every weight," and "sin which clings so closely." Not chains I chose that morning. Bad habits. Patterns running quietly in the background, eating away at me, clogging the soul, until nothing could flourish. That is how it felt in Changi. I was not dramatically wicked most days. I was simply full, and there was no room for God.

Pastor Paul Tan taught me, through the Crossroads studies, that I could not break these bad habits by staring at them. Willpower is a poor cure. The writer of Hebrews says the same thing in verse 2: look away from yourself and look to Jesus, the author and finisher of faith. He alone can locate what I cannot see, and He alone has the authority to remove it.

But the passage does not stop at verse 2, and I am glad it does not. Verses 5 to 11 speak of discipline: the Lord chastens those He loves. That was hard to read in a cell. It is still hard to read at the URA café when a Restarter I have poured months into walks out the door, or when SY and I sit with numbers that do not add up. Yet the writer promises that discipline "yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness." The pruning is not punishment. It is the clean-up I would never do on my own.

Then verse 14: follow peace with all men, and holiness. Notice the order. Peace with people first. My anger and my pride were never private sins; they always landed on someone else. Throwing off the weight is not just about my race. It is about the people running beside me.

Nine years on, I still run. I still catch old bad habits trying to creep back. But I run lighter now, because I keep looking up, and because I have stopped pretending I can clean myself up on my own.