Arrival of Love

I'm what you might call hyper-sensitive to my sins. After all, as introspective as I get pretty often, it'd be hard to not at least be aware of my shortcomings. And they are many. It's something I try, with mixed results, to work on. Still, even aware as I am, it's appalling how often I seem to lose control and fall prey to the patterns of sin I know I'll later regret.

There are reasons behind my sins, of course; things like getting distracted or overwhelmed under given circumstances, or just being undisciplined in general. Part of my growth is in learning how to deal with these issues. But my purpose now is neither to explain nor even address these problems and solutions.

I know I'm, by far, not the only one to go through this behavioral pattern. But I'm always ashamed when I mess up. Too often I lose my temper or fall into a deep, dark depression, say a lot of things I don't mean, and think even more things I can otherwise acknowledge as being completely irrational. When I later snap out of these negative mindsets, there's often a lot to account for to other people, ending with apologies that I'm sure sound progressively less genuine each time. They do to me, anyway.

Such a thing happened again recently. I'm not sure if my poor attitude and mindset actually manifested in a way that was noticeable to other people, but I was certainly conscious of it, and that was enough for me. Sin is sin, after all.

My normal pattern after losing control like that is to seclude myself somewhere and degrade myself in that solitude. But for some reason, that was not my reaction this time. While I did go off by myself and have some pretty negative thoughts, when it came down to it, what I felt compelled to do instead was address God directly. I asked Him for forgiveness.

It was amazing, what happened next. I had a wash of memories of people telling me how much God loves me, how pleased He is with me, and how He has great things planned for my life. I suddenly remembered God's love for His children. Not just an awareness, but an actual realization of His love for specifically me, at least to an extent. It felt like He was telling me that He loved me no less because of my sins, and that my repentance from them was what pleased Him.

This is evidence of God's predilection for taking our innate destructiveness and using even that to deepen our relationship with Him. A way of showing that not only is no one beyond redemption, but that when someone is so redeemed, it serves an even higher purpose: His glory through unthinkable grace and forgiveness.