Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities.
—Psalm 51:9
One attractive computer function is the delete button. It is freeing to have the ability to delete what does not suit us. We might delete text as we edit a document, or delete information that is no longer necessary, or delete whole documents that may contain personal thoughts and feelings that we do not want shared. Once we click the delete button, it is as if a total erasure has occurred, and we have something clean and new before us.
If only we could push a delete button on all the less than beautiful parts of our lives in the same way that we do on the computer—the painful memories, the hurtful remarks, the blatant betrayals, the sins of omission and commission, the lack of thoughtfulness and care—if all of these could simply be erased, leaving no trace behind them.
God did not wait for computers to make use of the concept of deletion. Whenever we recognize the reality of our own frailness and failings, and we pray to heaven to forgive, God pushes the holy delete button, and our failures and sins are blotted out. More than simply being cast into cyberspace, they are washed away like dirt on a newly sprayed sidewalk.
The water clears the mud away until there is nothing left of the mess we so regretted. We do not need to struggle to “let go” of what is less than beautiful in ourselves. We do not need to wish we had a delete function in our lives. We need only ask the love of heaven to drop holy water on the mud of our lives until those lives run clean.
O God, let me feel the water of your love purifying me and making me whole.
