I stand as one guilty of accusing God’s plan. I don’t resist these charges. Their allegations are true. I’ve been weighed and found wanting in all kinds of ways. But Jesus, you are always, always, always calling me up and away with you, asking me to forgive myself and move forward, as if these things that I have done don’t even matter at all.
How can this be? I am told that you are a holy God, absolutely intolerant of sin, and I am shown my own trespasses in a light and a way after which I have no misgivings about the severity of things, in general.
None of this matters to you. Jesus, your atonement has rendered all my transgressions inert, removed, harmless, irrelevant…and my only actual instructions from you now are to come up and away, away from the catastrophe, away from the lies, away from the things which put my mind in a place where I am vulnerable to believing that there is anything beneficial at all whatsoever about the way things can go, apart from you, because there is no separation now. I must retain NOW in my thoughts, in my memories. I must remember NOW.
You are with me NOW. You call me up to you NOW. You call me up and away in the moment, in each individual moment, and they are adventures, all of them, beyond my most optimistic inclinations, and they are wonderful beyond words, and all of this is too much for me. It is too good.
This is what I am called to wake up to, in this great, violent spasm of repentance. This is what you mean when you talk about choosing you. This is righteousness, this beautiful perfection. I have been a fool, and you call me anyway. I have been a transgressor, an accuser, a wretched, vengeful glutton, running blindly from pain, and into pain, and slapping away the helps and the provisions, and the opportunities for more and greater freedom. I have chosen the darkness, and I was choosing the darkness when you found me, and I continued to choose it in all kinds of ways when you broke in upon me and invaded my soul with peace.
You take me from this perch of malevolent fear, and you place me in a garden of joy.
I must remember the NOW. I look at each present moment as only an opportunity for more of what you are in my NOW.
In this place of choosing only you, there flows a river of healing that never stops. Death no longer progresses, no longer attains, no longer controls or directs. Life has been chosen here now, and it is all that there is for me, for us…and we choose it together.
