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.