“Whether the play works or not,
you have to have a short memory.
You can’t let one play affect the next one.”
—Rich Brooks, UK Football Coach 10/14/2009
Can an all-knowing God choose not to know something? Apparently:
“I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” [Isaiah 43:25 NIV]
Even if God is the consummate list keeper, even if God does have that ultra-sharp pencil, I know from abundant personal experience that God spends most of the time using the eraser at the other end.
Since God’s blotter erases every trace of my sin from God’s memory, it would make sense for me to shorten my own memory for those sins. If I need to make restitution, it shouldn’t be because I have been tortured into it by bad memories, but because I have accepted responsibility for my actions. In times past, I have almost considered it my Christian duty to agonize over past mistakes. I didn’t see it as neurotic wallowing but as necessary discipline. In reality, it led to paralysis by analysis.
Today, I am shadowed less by Big Guilt and more by the combined effect of many smaller regrets. It is the disappointing accumulation of daily mishaps, self-indulgences, missteps and thoughtless behaviors that literally dis-illusions me, that demonstrates I am still well short of the mark. Always, my single biggest disappointment is knowing that I do not yet love God enough.
In its best and most helpful form, that disappointment washes like a tear into a sweet brokenness that mellows me, re-sizes my ego, strips my masks, and carries me even deeper into the heart of God. In its worst and least helpful form, that disappointment causes me to sequester myself away from God until, in my opinion, I have endured a sufficient period of self-inflicted isolation. Disappointment is helpful when it drives me back to God, just the reverse when it drives me away.
Why would God want me to come running back to him, almost immediately after tacking on yet another sin? Shouldn’t I take myself out of the game and warm the bench while others do God’s work? And, if I do bench myself, how long should I sit out?
Not long.
God urgently wants to shorten the time I spend on the sideline, but that doesn’t mean I can cheat the process, which usually unfolds like this. First there is fringe awareness, then conviction, then acknowledgment, then regret, then forgiveness, then self-forgiveness, then self-forgetting, then (yay!) rebound. Sounds complicated but, sometimes, when I take the fullest possible advantage of God’s saving grace, I can accelerate prayerfully through all these stages in less time than it has taken you to read this reflection. My Catholic friends tell me the confessional booth is a powerful accelerator. Somehow, we all need to move quickly to the rebound stage because, hey, there is work to do. If we stay too long in one of the other stages, we won’t be able to respond to God’s call to action.
So, the choice is mine. I can allow myself to get stuck somewhere between fringe awareness and forgiveness … or … I can go on to develop the self-forgetting, the “short memory,” that allows me to move ahead without the weight of disappoitment.
Specularity 