Coming clean
1Our God, you bless everyone
whose sins you forgive
and wipe away.
2You bless them by saying,
“You told me your sins,
without trying to hide them,
and now I forgive you.”
3Before I confessed my sins,
my bones felt limp,
and I groaned all day long.
4Night and day your hand
weighed heavily on me,
and my strength was gone
as in the summer heat.
5So I confessed my sins
and told them all to you.
I said, “I’ll tell the LORD
each one of my sins.”
Then you forgave me
and took away my guilt.
6We worship you, Lord,
and we should always pray
whenever we find out
that we have sinned. Then we won’t be swept away
by a raging flood.
7You are my hiding place!
You protect me from trouble,
and you put songs in my heart
because you have saved me.
8You said to me,
“I will point out the road
that you should follow.
I will be your teacher
and watch over you.
9Don’t be stupid
like horses and mules
that must be led with ropes
to make them obey.”
10All kinds of troubles
will strike the wicked,
but your kindness shields those
who trust you, LORD.
11And so your good people
should celebrate and shout.
Adam and Eve realised what they’d done the minute they had done it. What looked beautiful and tasty, turned out just to bring embarrassment and shame. Having their eyes opened turned out not to be as good as they thought it might be.
Knowing you have got something wrong can be the most uncomfortable feeling there is. But what can you do with those feelings?
Perhaps the only effective thing to do is hand it over to God.
That sounds like such a simple solution, but sometimes it is the only thing we can do. Some things we can try to make right – others we can’t. Do we let our lives be crippled by them? Or do what we can.
There can be some quite hideous things go in our bin. Mouldy bread (there’s always a couple of mouldy slices in the bottom!), cloths from cleaning up spills and general dirt, things that are used or empty and no longer have any use, and in my brown bin at the moment the poor dead plants that have failed to survive the winter. But the bin men will take all that away, it is gone, dealt with, and they never come and dump it back on my doorstep.
God does the same with the things that have gone wrong in our lives. We can give them to him. He deals with them. They are gone, wiped away, forgiven. We can hide them away, and they will fester even more; or tell them to him and know his forgiveness and freedom. And he does more than that. God doesn’t just leave us with a hole in our lives, he doesn’t leave us floundering, but points us in the way to go from here.
God forgives us – we can celebrate and shout, and without all that baggage, journey much easier.
Thank you Lord
that though we sometimes get things wrong
you forgive us,
you wipe us clean
and take our burdens from us.
You save us
and point us in the way we should go.
May we walk with you
with our hearts freed,
our souls lifted,
trusting your path
Pam's Perambulation 