The Grace of Repentance

I recently had someone ask me if I believed in repentance.  It's funny because it feels like it should be such an easy answer, but for me it's not.  For me the word repentance brings back nightmares I had as a child.  Waking up at night to a silent house, straining to hear the slightest noise that would tell me I wasn't the only one left in the house.  At 10 years old my fear wasn't that an ax murderer had broken in and killed everyone, it was that God had decided to take everyone who had proved they were sincere about their "repentance" to Heaven and I was the only one in our family who was left because I knew my heart.  I knew as much as I might try I wasn't perfect and that I messed up a lot!

We would sing Jesus Loves the Little Children and I never believed it because I didn't feel worth loving much.  I looked at myself even as a child and just saw all of the things I couldn't get right.  I lived in fear of God rather than basking in the love and grace of God.  I saw God as someone who wanted to punish me not bless me.  Over the years I came to see blessings as things God gave you for performing as expected.  Not the result of the overabundance of his love for me.

Over the weekend I came up against a piece of my past that I thought I had moved through.  The heart wrenching fear that God didn't love me after all and that nothing I could do or say was good enough.  The incident had me sitting in a chair begging God to show me the truth and counter the lie that inside I knew was wrong, but the message from my past of an unforgiving God was so strong that it triggered my panic attacks.

Earlier in the year I purchased a necklace that reads pre-approved and has the definition inside a pendant.  I purchased it because somehow I knew I needed the physical reminder that God has pre-approved me.  Others opinions of me do not matter and they do not define my relationship with Him.  In this particular moment that message became the exact thing that God could use to speak the truth of who I am and who He is making me into.  It reminded me that I'm his Beloved, he values me and loves me more than I can imagine.

Over the course of the next 24 hours it felt like God just began showering me with reminders of his love, grace and truth.  He reminded me that David who failed so much was someone he called a man after God's own heart.  David, who killed a man after sleeping with his wife.  David, who didn't pay attention and tried to move God's ark in a way much different from God's directions.  David who had multiple wives.  This was a man who lived a really messy life, but the Psalms are filled with his searching for God.  I was reminded that the simple definition to repentance is not a list of rules I have to keep up with.  It's not penance when I've screwed something up.  It's realizing I'm walking in a different direction from God and correcting course.  It's changing my ways, not beating myself up over the fact I can't be perfect.

Grace is not something I can earn, but for repentance to be genuine it has to be something I can accept and live in.  Love. Grace.  Repentance.  You can't separate them.  Without love and grace, repentance is only judgement and humiliation.  Without repentance, love and grace are only tools to excuse anything we might want to do.  Separate they can be abused, but embraced together they become a thing of beauty and life change.  Together they give us David's story that inspires us to strive to be called like he was "a man after God's own heart".

So do I believe in repentance?  Absolutely!  I've lived it.  I experience it every day when I screw up.  I experience it every time that I let the lies from the past overwhelm what God is doing in my present.  But I also believe that it must be embraced with love and grace to have any effect in our lives.  Repentance becomes the means to repair relationship with God, not the means for our brokenness to be held over our heads.

Abandon

 

In architecture, space sculpts the soul of a building, creating places for people to relax and relate.

~Bonnie Gray

I've recently come across an Instagram account called itsabandoned that fascinates me.  It's pictures of places that have been abandoned by humanity.  Some of them are left in such a way you expect to see the former residents walk back in to take up their lives at any moment.  Others there is an almost painful beauty in the abandoned state.  The beauty comes by the space that has been vacated by some unknown force.  I've wondered more than once why this account holds my attention, but every day I find myself looking for the newly captured empty beauty by a random photographer.  

Maybe these photos capture my attention because of what they represent.  Something that was productive, useful and served a purpose, but now is left to the fate of falling into disrepair and loneliness.  Maybe they hold my gaze just a little longer because I feel like them.  Once useful and productive, but now nothing.....   

Maybe I look at them and see the dreams and hopes that existed in myself 2 years ago that now feel impossible to achieve most days.  Maybe I look at them and see the people that walked away from them seeing the upkeep as too much and see the part of myself that others have reacted to as too broken.  

And then I look again and see the beauty in their abandoned state.  They might have been abandoned by those with less vision, but someone came along and was inspired by what was left by the less astute. That gives me hope.  Someone saw these places that were left behind, lost and unappreciated by those who found their definition of beauty in the newer and flashier locale and redeemed their abandoned state by recognizing the beauty of their existence.  That gives me hope.  Hope that the parts of me that seem too broken for some do have a purpose and beauty.  It reminds me as God reminded Samuel that while man looks on the outward appearance and measures me with his finite knowledge.  God looks at my heart.  God looking at the heart is how David failed so many times by man's evaluation, but God saw in David a man after His own heart.  

My husband likes to talk about embodied energy when talking about the advantage of using an existing building.  I think I look at these pictures of abandoned places and I'm reminded that when God looks at me He sees embodied energy.  He sees what He's already invested in growing me, in the dreams He's given me and in the plans He has for me and once more I find hope.  Hope that much like these rejected places that have been captured in pictures for every time I'm rejected God has someone waiting to recognize what I can be and to join me in that journey.  

The interesting thing about abandoned things....  while some choose to abandon them it creates space and movement for the few that choose to appreciate them.  There is a certain freedom that comes with living in abandonment.  Freedom to discern what's most important and what's least important.  Freedom to say no, but also freedom to say yes.  Freedom not to be defined by the abandoned state, but to live with abandon.