When we sin or transgress against the Commandments of God, we are cut off from the fullness of His presence. This can be painful and disorienting and can make us sad or downright miserable. We can't help but try to interpret this cascade of negative emotions and suffering in a way that makes sense to us. If we feel so bad from being cut off, we must in fact be bad. God must be angry with us, hate us even. Because that connection has been severed, it feels as if God has abandoned us and turned His back on us. Even Jesus Christ was not immune to this kind of visceral, gut punch reactionary interpretation of being cut off from the Lord. Jesus knew the whole scope of the Atonement. He knew that even though He had never sinned, He would need to share in the horrors that we all have faced in being cut off from God. And yet, despite knowing all of this, and knowing, to a degree that we never will, how profoundly and utterly Heavenly Father loved Him and was proud of Him, when push came to shove and Christ was in fact cut off from the Lord, how did He react? “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). In that moment of pure agony, even Jesus could not help but interpret that soul shattering loss of being cut off from His Father as some kind of sign that God had forsaken Him. Is it any wonder that we fall into the same interpretive pitfall, as weak and imperfect as we are if even Christ Himself could not help but assume the worst when that horrible rending moment happened? Being cut off from our Heavenly Father is purely a consequence of sin. Being cut off does not alter the tiniest particle of God's love for us or diminish in any way the value with which He holds us. Our Heavenly Father cannot be as near us when we are in need of repentance but He desperately wants to be reunited fully with us as soon as possible. Being cut off is supposed to be temporary. Indeed, the sooner we can sincerely and fully repent and stitch God back into our lives the better, as far as our Heavenly Father is concerned. He cannot and will not abandon or forsake us, nor will He ever hate or despise us. As much pain and suffering as being cut off causes both us and our Heavenly Father, He always wants us to come back as soon as we possibly can. The truth is, we don't always know what the Lord is thinking. We should not make the mistake that because being cut off is painful that somehow our Heavenly Father derives some kind of satisfaction or pleasure from our pain. Rather than imagining God with some giant pair of Scissors of Condemnation that He uses to cut off His wicked and nasty children, we should imagine instead that through temptation or distraction or neglect we have allowed ourselves to drift so far away from our Heavenly Father that the cords of love and charity that bind our hearts together got so thin that they finally snapped. That snapping hurts like the devil but it does not mean that Heavenly Father wants us out of His life. I hope whenever that we have found ourselves cut off from God once again we waste little time trying to project our fears and insecurities onto God and we just instead remember that our Father loves us and He wants to heal all of our hurts and that there is no one better that God the Father and Jesus Christ to help heal our wounds and bind us back together and repair our relationship with them.
