Letting Go

I was at a camp once where you could do a "trust fall", closing your eyes and falling backwards into the arms of your friends. Most such falls happen with the faller's feet on the ground, but this one...well, for this one, you had to climb a short ladder nailed into a tree, stand on a platform about five or six feet off the ground, and then fall backward. I didn't do it. I didn't have the faith that my classmates would catch me. (Looking back on it, I was a real pain at the time, and can hardly blame them for not wanting to.) They encouraged me to do it, but I was not about to put my safety in their hands. Fast forward about 18 or 19 years to last night. I finally forgave myself. I know I've written about it before on here and it's even one of the (biggest and hardest) steps in becoming confident, yet I hadn't finished it for myself. I'd written down pages and pages of what I had done to others and a little of what I had done to myself, but I really hadn't forgiven myself for anything more than not getting perfect scores on everything in school. I started up Monday on finishing the list of my failings and made up excuse after excuse to distract me from it. Yesterday, I worked on it a little more steadily but still got distracted often. Then last night, I finally buckled down and got to it seriously. I had to stop posting details. It wasn't just that it was too long of a project; it is that it was too painful to deal with. My list of failings could fill several books. Every time I thought of a particular year or a person I had once been close with, another way I had messed up came to mind. I started writing in generalizations...only to find that that, too, was too much. I forced myself to finish that list, wondering how I could forgive myself of all of it. In Word, it was 20 single-spaced pages, with so many incidents left out or lumped together, and I didn't even go through my time in my last young adults group or last job carefully. I started writing that I forgave myself, but could only forgive myself for not getting 100s all the time. I took a walk to pray and meditate. On the walk, I realized what I was doing by not forgiving myself: I was putting more faith in myself to ruin my life than I was putting in God to fix it. With all the things I've done, the more common theme is not what a jerk or loser I was, but that by being a jerk and loser, I had wasted so many opportunities, so many years, and I didn't believe opportunities like these will ever come again. I'm 30 now and will be 31 at the end of next month. I've had so many chances over the years and, one way or another, either missed or threw away all of them. Even if I'm given a pass until I turned 18, that's still about 13 years, about 1/6 of my expected life, thrown away, and not just any sixth, but arguably the most important one. It was the lost time, the lost chances, that I could not forgive myself for even more than all the actions or times I didn't act and should have. But in that unforgiveness was a lack of faith in the Creator of the Universe. Here in Colorado Springs, the city glow prevents one from seeing as many stars as you might in the country or up in the mountains, but there is one particular star that burns brighter than I've seen any star burn in Illinois, Oklahoma, or Virginia. All of the stars seem brighter, in fact. As I was looking up at this one, though, so many trillions of miles away, I realized that God formed it with a word. Some stars are so large that if they were to replace the sun, they would swallow Earth as well, and God created every last atom in them. That same God created me, took the time to count the hairs on my head, sees each heartbeat, records each thought...and loves me regardless of what I do. When I got back to my room, I forgave myself, knowing it was the biggest step of faith I had ever taken in my life. All of the things I have done wrong in the past have been forgiven by God for a long time; now I've forgiven myself, too. For all the time I've wasted and opportunities I've missed, for what I've done to others and myself, for everything. I'm believing that the God who created the Universe has the power to change my life. I'm letting go of all the daydreams of how I wanted my life to be, letting go of the past, too. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

Thomas Jefferson cut out sections of the Bible that he didn't agree with. The result is the Jefferson Bible, which omits the resurrection, Jesus' divinity, and other concepts many Christians hold as core beliefs of Christianity. He wanted to boil the Gospel message down to Jesus' teachings but, while a book on the teachings of Jesus would certainly have value, dismissing the rest of the life of Jesus and who He really was corrupts the message.

Yet I believe we often do the same thing in reverse. We accept Jesus' divinity and resurrection, at least on the surface, but not His teachings. In so doing, we indirectly call into question His divinity because if we believed with all our hearts that He was God and truly wanted the best for us, would we not listen? We read Scripture about loving our neighbor as ourselves and agree with it, then we go out and call someone a moron for cutting us off in traffic or judge someone based on their clothes or haircut or job. We listen to the story about the good Samaritan and then choose to sleep in on Saturday rather than distribute food to the poor. We are humbled when we remember how much we've been forgiven of, yet we harbor grudges against those who have abused our trust.

In my book on confidence, I wrote that it was not meant to be taken as a buffet of advice, where you select the two or three morsels that make the most sense to you and disregard the rest, but that it was meant to be taken as a whole. The same holds true of the Gospel message. You cannot take just the parts that you would agree with even if you weren't a Christian and claim the rest are only for that time and culture or that they somehow don't apply to you.

One note needs to be made here: I'm not suggesting we go back to Leviticus and never touch pigs and stone people who wear clothes made of different materials. We are no longer under the old law and the point of the law was never that we had to keep it to be holy; it was that no one could possibly keep it and so we needed a Savior. We are, however, to abide by the teachings of Jesus, not that we may enter into heaven, for that is based on grace and faith, not works, but that we may please Him and that our obedience will help us grow as Christians.

The same messages of loving your enemies, forgiveness, giving freely to those who ask, abstinence until marriage, submission to husbands, putting your wife's needs before your own (the Scripture reads "as Christ gave himself to the church" after all), and always being ready with a reason for your hope all still apply. If you haven't lived up to these, this is not judgment or condemnation. I haven't lived up to them, either. No Christian ever has perfectly. What it is is an exhortation to not dismiss parts of the Bible you find inconvenient or that mess up your fun. It is an encouragement to accept all of the truth of the Gospel because only when all of the truth is accepted is all of God accepted. He is love, but He is also the ultimate truth, and you cannot know Him the way He wishes you to if you reject whichever of His words that get in your way.