You never let go

Our past....your past, my past.  Is it safe to say that there are things in our past that we just find hard to let go of.  In my case, I had enormous difficulty letting go of my horribly sordid past of decades of decadent living.  I allowed it to control me, and in doing so it was impossible for two things to happen:

• I couldn't forgive myself
• and therefore, I couldn't conceive of the fact that God would forgive me.

It literally took an act of God (or rather a series of them, both directly and indirectly) for me to learn, and accept the fact, that God isn't carrying around a score card on which He notes that Joe's brokeness is worse than Jerry's brokeness.  But that isn't the most important thing for any of us to learn.  You see, when doing some reflective thought on my present spiritual condition as compared to where it was all those years, I came to terms with the fact that God was always at work...again, either directly or indirectly through other people...during that whole dark period of my life.  Now that is huge.  And it is equally huge to recognize that even now, as I continue to fail at times, He is still at work in me...just as He is in us all.

As I was listening to K-LOVE today, they happened to play one of Matt Redmon's songs...You Never Let Go.  Here is the chorus from that song:

                                                                   Oh no, You never let go
                                                                   Through the calm and through the storm
                                                                   Oh no, You never let go
                                                                   In every high and every low
                                                                   Oh no, You never let go
                                                                   Lord, You never let go of me.

God is like a tenacious bull dog...He simply never lets go.  Of us, that is.  He is NOT like our wives as we men are sometimes prone to joke about.  He doesn't hold our past over us.  In fact, and this is the single most important thing we should all learn and hold dear....He forgives us and gives us grace, no matter what when we bring our shortcomings to Him.

Sometimes we humans try to convince ourselves that if we are not "perfect" christians, then God will not forgive us.  Would not it be much easier just to accept the fact that we are broken, but doing everything we can to "fix" that condition?  That thought is made easier just by acknowledging to ourselves that God never let's go....no matter what.