Release, re-entry, redemption, reconciliation, renewal, recondition, rehabilitate, refinish, remodel, reconsider, revitalize, ....this is my favorite part of the dictionary. It points out so clearly that getting it right the first time is not part of the human condition.
All of us at some time or other have slipped up, including things that could get us arrested from connecting a palm to a face in anger or a baseball bat to a windshield, from letting a friend "share" a prescription tablet for a headache to finding something in a sweater at the bottom of the shopping cart that did not make it through the checkout process, to drinking one more than was legal before the drive home, to failing to secure goods in our care which results in their theft. The list is pretty long.
For many folks there is an assumption that people in jail are uniformly bad people. And it certainly is true that some folks work pretty hard to keep making foolish and incompetent choices before the gate swings shut. But the point is anyone can succumb to temptation. Even loosing our temper with our children and harming them with words is horrid if not actionable, but I don't know of any child who has totally escaped this experience even from loving family members. How about delaying another week that visit to the nursing home or a shut-in relative? According to the Bible, being hateful is the same crime as murder because killing the spirit and hope of another is sometimes harder to heal than a black eye; it just isn't illegal.
One thing that is so evident in jails and prisons is the cost of unhealed sin. In the free world we pretend we didn't do anything that wrong and we go on our way thinking that we are OK. But incarcerated or free world sin has a price and the price is numbness of soul, self-justification and a downward slope that keeps us on a treadmill of poor choices and unrepentance until we can justify more spitefulness, more corner-cutting, more spirit bruising choices. Some folks keep this up until the slope becomes steeper and steeper and the choice to change directions seems more and more impossible. A few visits to a nursing home and it will become clearer how far we can drift in our choices in just a few decades.
Not all wind up in a mortar and iron prison, but rather we imprison ourselves in attitudes that alienate families and friends, cut grandchildren off from family lore and laughter, break hearts in the name of self-righteousness and flood generations with unexamined ways of doing business that are destructive.
So find a dictionary and turn to the part that has the "re"s and consider also repentance, remembering, relationship, reality, relish, and rejoice that God renews us daily by the power of the blood of the Lamb, Christ and through the comfort of the Spirit of God.
No matter how far you have drifted or slipped, God loves you and longs to restore you to relationship.
All of us at some time or other have slipped up, including things that could get us arrested from connecting a palm to a face in anger or a baseball bat to a windshield, from letting a friend "share" a prescription tablet for a headache to finding something in a sweater at the bottom of the shopping cart that did not make it through the checkout process, to drinking one more than was legal before the drive home, to failing to secure goods in our care which results in their theft. The list is pretty long.
For many folks there is an assumption that people in jail are uniformly bad people. And it certainly is true that some folks work pretty hard to keep making foolish and incompetent choices before the gate swings shut. But the point is anyone can succumb to temptation. Even loosing our temper with our children and harming them with words is horrid if not actionable, but I don't know of any child who has totally escaped this experience even from loving family members. How about delaying another week that visit to the nursing home or a shut-in relative? According to the Bible, being hateful is the same crime as murder because killing the spirit and hope of another is sometimes harder to heal than a black eye; it just isn't illegal.
One thing that is so evident in jails and prisons is the cost of unhealed sin. In the free world we pretend we didn't do anything that wrong and we go on our way thinking that we are OK. But incarcerated or free world sin has a price and the price is numbness of soul, self-justification and a downward slope that keeps us on a treadmill of poor choices and unrepentance until we can justify more spitefulness, more corner-cutting, more spirit bruising choices. Some folks keep this up until the slope becomes steeper and steeper and the choice to change directions seems more and more impossible. A few visits to a nursing home and it will become clearer how far we can drift in our choices in just a few decades.
Not all wind up in a mortar and iron prison, but rather we imprison ourselves in attitudes that alienate families and friends, cut grandchildren off from family lore and laughter, break hearts in the name of self-righteousness and flood generations with unexamined ways of doing business that are destructive.
So find a dictionary and turn to the part that has the "re"s and consider also repentance, remembering, relationship, reality, relish, and rejoice that God renews us daily by the power of the blood of the Lamb, Christ and through the comfort of the Spirit of God.
No matter how far you have drifted or slipped, God loves you and longs to restore you to relationship.
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