For years, I have been ambushed by sudden lightning bolts of shame over mistakes I made decades ago as a teenager. It feels like I am constantly answering hateful phone calls meant for a version of myself that doesn’t exist anymore. I finally had to learn how to hang up on the prosecutor in my head and accept the grace I so freely give to others.
I used to start every semester by asking my students to define economics in a single word, and they almost always got it wrong. We often make the same mistake in our spiritual lives, trying to balance a ledger of good deeds to outweigh our failures. It turns out that the math of heaven is different than the math of earth, and the debt was never ours to settle.
The phone rings. The voice on the other end is grinding stone and venom — a collector demanding payment on a debt you can’t cover. He knows your name, your failures, every zero on the ledger. He’s calling your boss, your mother, threatening prison. But sitting on the desk is a notarized receipt. The debt has already been paid. Every threat is a bluff. Every accusation is a lie. If your internal dialogue has ever sounded like that collector’s voice, this post is for you. The accuser is a con man — and the paperwork says he’s already lost.
There are no lights on my house this year, and truthfully, my patience often wears thinner than a cheap bath towel. Even during the season of peace, my old, selfish habits stick to me like cockleburs on a wool sock. I have realized that the manger wasn’t built for people who have their lives perfectly gift-wrapped. It was built for the broken folks who need a fresh start before their morning coffee even cools.
You know the feeling — a wrong you committed surfaces out of nowhere and sits on your chest like a stone. You’d bury it if you could. But how deep is deep enough? The Titanic rests two and a half miles beneath the Atlantic, and the world still found it. Challenger Deep drops nearly seven miles, and even that’s not far enough. The nearest star beyond our sun is 25 trillion miles away — still not enough distance to outrun what haunts you. But God didn’t ask you to bury it. He already carried it farther than east is from west.
My stubbornness and selfishness tend to stick to me like old gum on the bottom of a shoe. I’d love to claim that I’ve outgrown the tendency to wander off like a toddler in a department store, but the truth is I still try to drive the bus and immediately get lost in the weeds. Thankfully, God doesn’t require a sparkling resume—just the admission that I need a fresh batch of mercy before the sun even comes up.