April 20, 2012

Delete

As I wind down my term on City Council I have literally deleted thousands of emails that have accumulated over the last four years. The in-box and the sent-box are now empty, as well as all the folders. I had kept many of those emails because they were a paper trail of sorts and some of them were positive and others negative. However, the computer screen is now wiped clean and I can no longer remember what was written or said. “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus.” (Acts 3:19-20 NIV)

1 comment:

Steve Corey said...

Gail;

-----OK. This is interesting. As a business, I don’t get to wipe any of my emails. By law I must save them all. Even ending my business doesn’t authorize the end of my emails. But politicians? I guess they get to rub the slate clean, brush the trail behind themselves, sending the evidence of all communications and sources and influences involving their decisions into oblivion. Hooo-kay. This life has a way of making very apparent the discrepancy between actuality and principle. Some channel of conveyance between what is said and what is done is definitely broken, for principles rarely turn up as the substance of actions.
-----Sins wiped out. Hmmm. I don’t know if I expected to stop sinning or not when I repented and was baptized. Here too actuality and principle do not correspond? I know I knew the concept of not sinning was no part of any reality I ever experienced. The best of the repented around me still left their shoe treads well imprinted on each other’s toes, where my tread-prints were too. Many of them had been repentant for decades, so I thought I had an excuse. Now that I’ve been repentant for decades and can still read the trade-marks of my boots recently stamped upon my neighbor’s feet, I’ve abandoned all excuses. Moreover, many of my wiped out sins still haunt the depths of my memories through which some still effect who I am. Then the same Bible that says turn to the Lord so sins may be wiped away says God is true and ALL mankind is false. Hooo-kay.
-----I would throw my Bible in the trash if I did not know anomalies to be peep-holes. Every anomaly disappears once you’ve looked through it and truly seen. Our sins are not wiped away from who we have become. Who we've become is an aggregation of all we’ve thought and done and rendered into meanings. This aggregation includes our sins, all of them, though we now relate to them differently. And that’s a key to seeing through the peep-hole.
-----We relate to them differently because we want something different than what we had done in those sins, even something different than what we are doing in our current sins. The Bible is right: all men are false. It is where we are stuck. But the repentant have resolved to desire truth, even though their actuality remains entrapped in the falsehood of where we live. But the entrapment does not mean that the principle of wiped away sin will not become the substance of our actions. For to desire something is an action. To desire the perfect righteousness Jesus Christ painstakingly made available to those who will is that place in this age of falsehood where a man becomes true in God’s sight. It is the only part of the actual you God looks upon for evaluation: if desire is for what’s right by His reckoning, He sees you from that tiniest spot wiped clean of sin because you desire and Christ works. Though He knows the truth that we desire by seeing its evidence in our improving actions and mental lives, the evidence is not sin free, either. It merely bespeaks a principle of how Christ’s righteousness becomes ours for now to carry us to when we will be made righteous actually. Then all our sin will be wiped away actually. So today, I will be content to see my wiped away sin through this peep-hole and to accordingly make evidence for God’s delight.

Love you all,
Steve Corey