like dust blown away...

i'm sitting here on my bed just thinking, and searching the internet. my little black lamp is on. i just want to write and write and write. sometimes what i'm thinking about is a caged animal. i can only think about it and let it out when i have the time. one of the things i just keep thinking about is forgiveness. i randomly image searched forgiveness... it's the most beautiful thing ever. i think someone rightly said we are most like God, most divine when we forgive. it really is an almost incomprehensible supernatural subject.. that God forgives... us.. and that we can even somehow forgive. i clipped a couple images that make me think about what it is that i just really want to get out in this i guess... not that i understand. 

i challenge you to just look really hard at these pictures and see beyond them. read each picture before my silly words. these are just my thoughts~

#1 well the first, i am just struck by the seaming effortlessness.. when to forgive, for me, is oh so hard, but for God~ how light and airy what is forgiven floats away.. to nothingness, how He removes our sin as far as the east is from the west and remembers no more. also, this picture makes me think of how on our part, when we forgive, it is letting go of what you really cannot hold on to in the first place.

#2 all the medicine you need.. wow, is this true... i think of how the Bible says once for all He died for our sins. once! that is the most incredible cure-all. all that we have ever done and ever will do covered. when i look again, i think how we in this world take so many drugs, so many medicines... heart medicines, depression medicines.. we are crazy on pills. have a problem, simply pop a pill, maybe that will fix it. maybe we need to forgive. would forgiveness of others make us live longer and eradicate medical conditions? i don't know, but it will cure our heart of hatred and bitterness and hurt.

#3 i just get lost in this picture for a multitude of reasons. it really is so beautiful and i want to go there, moreover i feel like its meaning is staggering. the bridge of forgiveness. we go out on a limb when we forgive, we literally build something hard, and dangerous for us.. our effort for resolution could not reach a receptive shore, they might not be even sorry. moreover, if it is true forgiveness, we have to leave the bridge up and allow ourselves the possibility of being hurt again by that person we forgave. my mind is also drawn toward one other beautiful bridge... the cross. stretched across a chasm of eternal punishment, Christ laid down his life on a cross that we might be forgiven.

#4 forgiveness is choosing to not remember the ugly. even when it was real. when i look at this picture i think of a beautiful artwork of hearts~ created from the barbwire from a concentration camp. it's almost disturbing what and the lengths to which Forgiveness forgives... it chooses to bloody it's fingers, slowly bending the sharp painful barbs of wire that were once used to torture it into a piece of love.

#5 i think of humility. the words make a story unfold before me of a bitter husband raking his elderly wife over the coals for a simple mistake and how she simply and beautifully said... "i'm sorry dear, i'm still learning." still learning, ..being willing to learn when more than half of your life is over. this astounds me. how often i have come into God's presence and cried out "forgive me father, i'm just a child!" why do we not give others the grace that God gives us. humility is intertwined with forgiveness... you must be humble to ask for it, and able to be humble to give it to another.

#6 myself as a child at a chalkboard with a whine.... "how many times do i have to?" then the scene shifts as i stand before the chalkboard of life, where i must perform: this time with a far more insurmountable problem: forgive~ how many times do i have to? hmm.. i look at this picture once more.. i think of one more thing. my sins, oh my sins. they are many like chalk dust~... blown far away.

I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. isaiah 44:22