I keep the Bible app next to the dating app like I’m trying to make them talk to each other.
Both glow like tiny stained-glass windows in the dark of my phone. One promises salvation. The other promises someone named “Jay, 26, 2 miles away, likes dogs.”
And I swipe between psalms and profiles with the same guilty thumb.
My screen-time report says 7 hours 42 minutes a day, and the Bible app gets three of those minutes.
Three holy minutes. Three minutes where I read something about grace, mercy, light— then go right back to coveting my neighbor’s entire life on Instagram like it’s my full-time ministry.
Sometimes I imagine God getting my stats the way Spotify does at the end of the year:
Top activity: scrolling
Most revisited passage: “Be still.”
Most ignored commandment: yes
Mood: “half-repentant and fully human”
Device battery: spiritually and literally 5%
This morning, the Bible app pinged me all cheerful like:
“Good morning! Here’s a reminder to be kind, gentle, and slow to anger.”
I read it while being unkind, ungentle, and furious at a stranger’s political opinion before my eyes were fully open.
Then coffee. Then nicotine. Then the memory of who I texted at 2:14 a.m. A message that started holy and ended horizontal.
I don’t skip the prayer. I just say it faster.
There’s a verse about resisting temptation, and I highlight it in yellow— while wearing last night’s perfume like a confession that hasn’t reached my mouth yet.
My halo flickers like bad Wi-Fi. Signal weak. Connection unstable. God typing… me deleting the message before it’s sent.
Because my phone is basically a tiny altar I keep in my bed for convenience and betrayal.
At 2:07 a.m., it goes:
Verse of the Day: “Create in me a clean heart…” Also my phone: “u up?” Also my phone: LOW BATTERY: 5%
Trinity of modern devotion: scripture, temptation, and consequences.
I wish sin came with an unsubscribe button. Like I could long-press my bad habits until they wobble and hit the little X.
But my vices don’t wobble. They sit there glossy and patient like they pay rent.
Meanwhile the Bible app is aggressively kind. It tracks my streak like a jealous lover.
Day 19! confetti animation. gold star. As if a clean heart is something you unlock like a premium skin.
Nineteen days. My longest relationship.
And I’m sitting there in the dark, half-naked in bed, reading about renewal while my life smells like last night’s choices—sweat, perfume, and the faint accusation of cheap incense someone lit to pretend the air could be forgiven.
On the nightstand: a lighter, an empty glass, a crumpled receipt, and a condom wrapper like a tiny deflated halo.
And I’m thinking: Define clean.
Because I am not a hypocrite. I’m a tug-of-war rope. Frayed by heaven on one end and gravity on the other.
I read about saints who starved in deserts and fought off demons with prayer and fasting.
I fight mine with memes, late-night playlists, and the hope that shame expires by morning.
I kneel beside my bed in the same spot where I made promises I absolutely meant at the time.
My knees know the carpet better than my intentions do.
I ask for strength. Then ask for forgiveness in advance.
Because I know myself. Because I know tonight.
And here’s the part I don’t say out loud at church: I’m scared if I stop the bad habits, I’ll have to feel everything I’ve been avoiding. If I put down the smoke and the scroll and the late-night bodies, maybe what’s left is just… sadness.
But the Bible app doesn’t care about my search history. It doesn’t judge my caffeine intake or my unresolved emotional nonsense.
It just hands me a line like:
“Be still.”
And for three minutes, something in me unclenches.
Not because those three minutes erase the other seven hours and thirty-nine. But because they interrupt them.
Like opening a small window in a room where my brain has been hotboxing itself with anxiety and self-loathing.
So I tell God the truth, because honestly I’m out of energy for performance:
I love You. I try. I fail. I try again tomorrow.
Faith is not the absence of flaws. It’s the quiet decision to keep showing up even when you arrive rumpled— smudged— half-repentant and fully human.
I don’t think God expects me to be clean. I think He expects me to be honest.
And somehow, in the space between my worst habit and my best intention, grace lives there with me— patient as unread messages, steady as breath, waiting for me to stop confusing holiness with perfection.
I fall asleep with the Bible app still open, screen dimming to black.
And for once, I don’t feel like a fraud.
Just a person who believes in something sacred while still being wonderfully, disappointingly, beautifully flawed.
Anyone else living with faith and flaws like they share a charger?
submitted by /u/deadeyes1990
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