Into your hands I commit my spirit; redeem me, O Lord, the God of truth. - Psalm 31:5

JOURNAL 12/13/97 I know you. I created you. I have loved you from your mother's womb. You have fled - as you now know - from my love, but I love you nevertheless and not-the-less however far you flee. It is I who sustains your very power of fleeing, and I will never finally let you go. I accept you as you are. You are forgiven. I know all your sufferings. I have always known them. Far beyond your understanding, when you suffer, I suffer. I also know all the little tricks by which you try to hide the ugliness you have made of your life from yourself and others. But you are beautiful. You are beautiful more deeply within than you can see. You are beautiful because you yourself, in the unique person that only you are, reflect already something of the beauty of my holiness in a way which shall never end. You are beautiful also because I, and I alone, see the beauty you shall become. Through the transforming power of my love which is made perfect in weakness you shall become perfectly beautiful. You shall become perfectly beautiful in a uniquely irreplaceable way, which neither you nor I will work out alone, for we shall work it out together. (from Known by the Reverend Dr. Charles K. Robinson.) God sees the beauty he created in me, but I do not and I will not believe him when he tells me that it is there. Instead, I put on a mask to try and hide the ugliness I've made of my life, never realizing that my real self, even marred as it is by a lifetime of sin, is far, far more beautiful than the most perfect mask I can ever hope to create. My real self was, and is, created by God, and no matter what I do I can never damage it so badly that its beauty is fully destroyed. There is in me something of the beauty of God himself, which no mask can ever hope to equal, and no sin can fully hide. How strange it is that so often we ourselves do not see the potential God has placed in us. We don't see what we could become if we would just allow him to release what is already there. Others see what we are and what we can become, but we do not. It is only as we listen to, teach, and above all learn to trust each other that we can grow into the fullness of our true selves. We hold each other up. Together we are in truth the very body of Christ, with all that implies. Alone we are nothing but unrealized potential.

JOURNAL 1/11/98 Jeremiah 31:1-6. "At that time," declares the Lord, "I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they will be my people." This is what the Lord says: "The people who survive the sword will find favor in the desert; I will come to give rest to Israel." The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: "I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness. I will build you up again and you will be rebuilt, O virgin Israel. Again you will take up your tambourines and go out to dance with the joyful. Again you shall plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria; the farmers will plant them and enjoy their fruit. There will be a day when watchmen cry out on the hills of Ephraim, 'Come, let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God.'" God says, "O virgin Israel" to the very nation he had previously called an adulteress (Jeremiah 13:25-27; Hosea 1:2) and a prostitute (Jeremiah 2:20; 3:1; Isaiah 1:21.). He has done an impossible thing; restoring the purity of people who have made themselves impure. Israel had given themselves over to the grossest idolatry, to sexual immorality, to greed, and to every imaginable form of wickedness, yet they found grace in the desert and God once again calls them "virgin." Jeremiah 30:12-17. "This is what the Lord says: "'Your wound is incurable, your injury beyond healing. There is no one to plead your cause, no remedy for your sore, no healing for you. All your allies have forgotten you; they care nothing for you. I have struck you as an enemy would and punished you as would the cruel, because your guilt is so great and your sins so many. Why do you cry out over your wound, your pain that has no cure? Because of your great guilt and many sins I have done these things to you. "'But all who devour you will be devoured; and all your enemies will go into exile. Those who plunder you will be plundered; all who make spoil of you I will despoil. But I will restore you to health and heal your wounds,' declares the Lord, 'because you are called an outcast, Zion, for whom no one cares!'" The wound is incurable, but God will heal. He will restore what can not be restored, and repair what can not be repaired. God will discipline Israel, but then, in the desert, he will restore to them the purity they have thrown away. Just as he will do for me. God will heal. He will rebuild. He will restore. He will call virgin the very ones who were once called adulterers and prostitutes. This is what Paul means when he says: Romans 8:3-4 And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit. It means that, for us who are in Christ, no evil is permanent. No evil whatsoever. There are no permanent stains, and there is nothing I have ever done wrong that will not be made right. Forgiveness is not just a matter of avoiding punishment but remaining in my second-class, marred condition. God does not leave me as "damaged goods." Instead he works a transformation as radical, and as impossible, as going from adultery to virginity. Forgiveness means that God has undone what could not be undone.

JOURNAL 1/14/98 I'm still trying to process the Jeremiah passage from three days ago. And it's still too big. God has embarrassed himself by making a promise even he can't fulfill. How can innocence be restored once I have lost it? What God is saying here about who I am in relation to him directly contradicts what my heart says can ever happen. If what the Scripture says is true then I still have a distorted view of myself, which can only stem from having a distorted view of God. This is the God who says: Jeremiah 31:31-34. "The time is coming," declares the Lord, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them," declares the Lord. This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the Lord. "I will put my law in their minds and wrote in on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the Lord. "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." I've read this promise many times, but I think I have missed the significance of the last phrase, "...and will remember their sins no more." and never asked the question, if God does not remember something is it still there? If God chooses not to acknowledge that something exists, does it? If God truly is who we he says he is; Jeremiah 31:35. ...he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar - the Lord Almighty is his name then the answer must be no. If something does not exist in the mind of God, then it does not exist at all. Reality is precisely as God knows it to be. My mind knows this. My heart hasn't yet caught up. Father, like the man who brought his son to Jesus I'm crying out, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." Help me to trust what I know but don't feel; that you have done far more than just take away the punishment for my sins. You have taken away the sins themselves. Because I am in Christ, your requirements of righteousness have been perfectly met in me and I am holy. Teach me to believe, and to live in, the reality that: Hebrews 10:14 ...by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. © 1998, Joe Jefferson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to make copies for ministry purposes, provided no fee is charged and this copyright notice is included.