Saturday, April 24
For there is forgiveness with you...
—Psalm 130:3
Because we have the ability to reason and think, we naturally reflect on the actions we take in our lives. Some actions are motivated by fulfilling some insistent personal desire. Some, we well know, are ill-conceived from the start.
Others seem appropriate or right at the time, but when we later reflect on these actions, we find that they were amiss, wrong, or even evil. Oftentimes that is when regret and guilt are born in us.
We find ourselves going over and over our actions in our mind. We wish we could erase what has been done and are frustrated that we are helpless to do so.
So we scratch at our soul as if we are trying to scrub off tarnish from great grandmother's silver tea set. We figure if we scratch long enough, we will finally have “paid enough” for what we did, and we can be at rest. Forgiveness seems too indulgent until we have been punished.
But, rather than scrubbing our souls raw, we would do better to simply say to God, “I'm sorry, please forgive me. I thank you for telling me that you will. Please know how much I love you.”
With God there is always forgiveness. Nothing we do can ever be so bad that we cannot find forgiveness from God by asking honestly. It washes over our soul carrying with it the tarnish we tried so desperately to scratch away. We can once again see ourselves in the shine that lay beneath our tarnish, just waiting to be revealed.
In a word, stop scratching. Stop twirling and swirling in guilt and regret. Ask for God's forgiveness to wipe your soul clean.
“I'm so sorry, please forgive me. I thank you for telling me that you will. Please know how much I love you.”
These Signposts originally appeared on explorefaith in 2008.
