“The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” (Mark 1:3). We so often ask for forgiveness but do we truly prepare to receive it? In order to be forgiven, we first have to give ourselves. And by give I mean yield, as in, give way to a higher power. A lot of us want to eat our sins, as if we believe that if we can keep all of that evil bottled inside of us, we can prevent it from getting out into the world and hurting others. But if we leave the evil inside of us, it's just going to devour us from the inside out and then spew out onto others all the more violently for all of the time that we allowed it to fester and build up under pressure. Christ wants to transfuse us with His cleansing, healing, sanctifying, redeeming blood but we act like it's against our religion to receive life support from someone else. Christ wants so desperately to help us and if He has to climb over our walls and up onto our roof and slip what small amount of grace He can in the cracks of our defenses, then that is what He will do. But wouldn't it be so much better if we gave up our pride and our stubbornness, our bitterness and our resentment, and let down the drawbridge and opened up the gates and prepared the way of the Lord into our hearts and our souls so that He could let His mercy and goodness flow unrestricted into our lives? Let us first foregive so that we may be forgiven. Let us yield to the enticings of the Spirit which whisper that, despite all that we have done, Christ loves us and is willing and able to forgive us anyway. The first step of repentance is recognizing that we are wrong but the last step of repentance is getting out of the Lord's way so that He can perform the miracle of forgiveness. We all have pains and traumas and secret shames that we have locked away and tirelessly guard against the Lord's forgiveness. We can't keep the Lord waiting in the lobby forever. The sooner we let Him into every nook and corner of our souls, the sooner we will be able to cast out all of the fear and doubt and darkness and let every single particle of our souls be filled with the light and love and forgiveness of our Savior Jesus Christ.
