Forgiven

Although this "holiday" has pretty much been nonexistant for me over the last three years, happy Chinese new years! I won't lie, I've missed receiving red envolopes. Any form of being Chinese has pretty much been wiped away from me since starting bible college, so I've missed the celebrations a bit.

Since last post, quite a bit has happened actually; but it's rather late, so I don't think I'm going to talk too much about them. To highlight a couple of things, I was blessed to have my family visit me last Saturday to have a little birthday dinner for me at Earl's. I've never wanted my family to come down under any circumstance because I always felt like it's a waste of a day trip for them to come down just to see me. However, it was nice that they drove the hours, and I appreciate it a lot!

One other thing that really stands out for me was being reminded of what it means to be forgiven. I was sitting in my preaching class and my prof was talking about giving a gospel message. When he started talking about forgiveness, I think that it hit home pretty hard.

Basically, my prof was saying how people can be so hard on themselves sometimes for stupid things that they do or mistakes that they make. We KNOW that we don't deserve much in life because of our faults and all our weaknesses - we know it, it's engrained in our soul. But, like always, there's a difference between head knowledge, knowing it, and heart knowledge, REALLY knowing it.

It was a pretty profound moment when I heard that we can be so hard on ourselves for things that we do that sometimes we don't even want to be forgiven. We've failed so hard, fallen so far away from our "standards" or whatever we were aiming for, that we don't even think it's worth a second chance. That's pretty much me. I don't know how I became like this, having such incredibly high, and sometimes even unrealistic, expectations and standards, that when I fail to meet them, I kind of just bow out. I expect so much out of myself, and even other people, that if I see or hear them describing something as somewhat of a success, or a decent accomplishment, when to me it clearly could have been better, I get frustrated.

Then I remembered that God usually picks the people that are most reluctant, those who don't feel like they're skilled, the "lowly," so to speak, to do his good work. God's grace is bigger than our unforgiving selves. Even when we can't look ourselves in the mirror, God does; and not only that, he picks us up, dusts us off, and washes us clean.

I beat myself up like CRAZY when I don't do something the way I wanted to do it, and I don't want to forgive myself. It's almost laughable to me to know that God doesn't care that I've failed endlessly. He's still bigger.

Kind of like my previous post about healing, it's the same thing. We deserve death But God has forgiven us! He forgave you and me! That means, it doesn't matter what we've done; he's willing to look past that, and still bring us back together with him. That's insanity, man! We can't even forgive ourselves for not acing a test, or not playing well enough; but God sees through all the sins that we commit, and when we should be killed for it, he says, "it's okay - I forgive you." I don't know about you, but my reaction is basicaly.. HOLY !@#$

And that's what I've been reminded of a lot since 2013 started: God is bigger. I can just take any presuppositions I have about anything, everything that I've learned in school, all that stuff, and just throw it out the window because God is still bigger. His willingness to forgive our sins is the best news anyone can ever receive; so how do you not just stand there amazed?

It's great news.