I know that I need to _______ , but….. I know that I should ______ , but…. I admit that I ____ but….. Yes, _______ did happen, but…. These blanks can be filled with many different things, yet how often does the word “but” come in the middle of the sentence? I know for myself, I find that I use the “but” word when I am trying to make an excuse or justify myself. Have you ever paid attention to what you say when talking about things that you haven’t done, should be doing, or things that you did wrong? I never realized how much I tried to defend myself by making excuses until I started to pay attention to what came out of my mouth and the Holy Spirit shined light on what I was actually doing. And it became a game changer for me.

When we make excuses we are trying to justify our actions or lack of. If we have an excuse for something we are not taking full responsibility of it. And if we don’t take full responsibility we can not make a change or move past it. I may be completely wrong but this has been my experience and has rang true every time. If I knew that I treated someone badly and apologized to them for my actions by saying something like, ” I was wrong for what I did but you did this and that is why I reacted that way,” I didn’t take full responsibility for my actions. I was actually blaming them for my actions. Or let’s say that I had a bad habit of eating late at night. I say,, “I know that I need to eat by a certain time but by the time I get home and take care of everything it is late.” I am using the excuse of having to take care of things to justify my eating late. When in reality all I have to do is stop what I am doing to eat and then finish up what I was doing. I hope that I have used good enough examples to explain what I am trying to get at.

We are our own worst enemies when it comes to making positive changes sometimes. Often times we are the cause of ourselves being stuck at a point in life too. We feel uncomfortable or embarrassed so we make an excuse.. We don’t really want to do the work so we make an excuse. We don’t want to accept full responsibility so we come up with an excuse. We don’t want to look weak, lazy, or stupid so we make an excuse. The list goes on as to why we make excuses but the same result comes from every one. And that is no growth or change. We cause further harm to ourselves with every excuse that we make. With every “but” that we use we hold ourselves back a little more from the best for ourselves.

This life lesson has been such a game changer for me and caused me to free myself in so many ways that I had to share it with you. I have struggled with writing this entry but I hope that I have worded it correctly enough that you get the point of what I am saying. Excuses hold us back. We have to own our junk so that we can be freed from it and move onto better days. We have to stop coming up with “reasons” as to why we put things off and just get them done so that we won’t be loaded down with shame, guilt, or regret. When we make a point to not have a reason to have to have an excuse we can get much further. Every area of our lives can be affected by excuses. They can end relationships, ruin health, steal confidence & self-esteem, cause job loss, create financial problems, and so on. So pay attention to what comes out of your mouth, and if you find a lot of excuses coming out, decide that you are not going to waste anymore time or energy with trying to justify yourself. Decide that it is what it is and you are going to live by truth and do what you gotta do to not live a life of excuses any longer. Jesus has given us all that we need to handle, deal with, and do everything in life so there is really no reason for excuses anyways, right.