January 07, 2015
Pre-Spot
During a holiday meal I dribbled some cranberry
sauce down the front of my white turtle neck top. My son-in-law, who has
laundry experience from his bachelor years, jumped into action and insisted we get
some detergent on it right away. I’m more of a pre-spot person, so when I’m
ready to do a load of laundry then I
look over the clothes, put on a dab of spot remover and toss them into the wash
— sometimes the stain comes out, sometimes it doesn’t. Tim offered to work on
the spot immediately, so I let him. Actually I thought the shirt was a goner, but
with his quick action the stain is gone. It’s not a far leap for me to see the
similarities between sins and laundry. There are times when sins are just not on
the forefront on my mind. I may postpone confession until bedtime prayers, before
taking communion, or even wait until the Spirit forces a confession out of me. “Come
now, let us reason together,” says LORD. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they
shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like
wool”” (Isaiah 1:18 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Life is more than the situations and circumstances in which we are involved and the things we move around and use. We sense them the most, so we feel our ties to them the strongest and perceive them to describe us at least, if not define us. In a sense, they are our trail of effects stamped into the substance of physical reality. Some of the results of our sins can be bettered, but not erased, like a broken vase can be glued, yet the lines of its fractures will always remain.
-----But we are defined in far more detail by the marks inside us. Both the recording of our sins are kept there, and the logic and sentiments behind them, too, as well as the mental and emotional processes which brought the sin forth into action. Psychologists say that brain neurons which fire together wire together, forming networks which are going to blink on and off at any stimulus. Since such networks are our thoughts and feelings and mental processes, our sins wire in.
-----That ain’t good. And if you think about it, Tim’s solution is the best approach to our sins. The quicker we confess, seek forgiveness, and make reparations, the sooner we can drop the event from our mental roster, that is, disconnect the network. For any stimulus which touches that neural network lights it up again, refreshing its existence.
-----That God forgets our sins is more than a godly kindness. We are not above Him so as to necessitate our remembrance of them. His forgetting them calls for ours too. Once forgotten through forgiveness, that particular neural network can lie fallow and fade away. The trick is learning how to forget entirely while remembering the good learned by the experience and the signposts for avoiding the same thing again.
-----Then there are those pesky tracks. When I was an adolescent, a couple years after my parents divorced, Mom and my brother and sister were all intent on moving to Boulder. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I threw myself on my bed and bawled like a petulant toddler. Two-hundred fifty miles between Mom and Dad were too much for me, and I demanded my own way until the planed move was shifted to Grand Junction. Then I was happy. But I caused a giant track in the lives of three other people. Life in Boulder would have been far different than in Grand Junction. My bad behavior permanently etched onto the substance of reality.
-----Paul says to give thanks for all things. The results of our sins are things. They are often differences which can not be reversed. But of every condition He can make good for those who love Him enough to think with Him (“Come now, let us reason together.”) Remembering the confession of what caused the difference while thanking Him for the difference, even when it is a bitter difference, wires up new neural networks tying into new life, new paths, places, things, and realities. The old circuits never completely go away during this temporal life. But they both get lost in the amazing mazes of new ones and fade in intensity to the point of losing all their emotional connectors.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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