Archeologists and Unafraid

It happens to all of us sooner or later. The older you get the more you move from being an astronaut to an archaeologist. When you’re young, you’re excitedly launching to worlds unknown. You’ve all of the major decisions of life before you, and you can spend your time assessing your potential and considering opportunities. It’s a time of exploration and discovery. It’s a time to go where you’ve never been before and to do what you’ve never done. It’s a time to begin to use your training and to gain experience.

But as you get older you begin to look back at least as much as you look forward. As you look back, you tend to dig through the mound of the civilization that was your past life, looking for pottery shards of thoughts, desires, choices, actions, words, decisions, relationships, and situations. And as you do this, you can’t help but assess how you’ve done with what you’ve been given.

Now let’s think about this for a moment as personal archeology can be very painful. Who would be so arrogant and bold as to look back on their life and say, “In every possible way I was as good as I could have been?" Wouldn’t we all hold some of those pottery shards in our hands and experience at least a bit of regret? Wouldn’t we all wish that we could take back words we’ve said, decisions we’ve made, or actions we’ve taken? Wouldn't we all wonder what we were doing, what were we thinking or who in the world did we think we were?

Here’s what all of this means: if you and I are at all willing to humbly and honestly look at our lives, we’ll be forced to conclude that we’re flawed human beings. And yet we don’t have to beat ourselves up. We don’t have to work to minimize or deny our failures. We don’t have to be defensive when our weaknesses are revealed. We don’t have to rewrite our own histories to make ourselves look better than we actually were. We don’t have to be paralyzed by remorse and regret. We don’t have to distract ourselves with busyness or drug ourselves with substances. Isn’t it wonderful that we can stare our deepest, darkest failures in the face and be unafraid? Isn’t it comforting that we can honestly face our most regretful moments and not be devastated? Isn’t it amazing that we can confess that we really are sinners and be neither fearful nor depressed?

Isn’t it wonderful that we can do all of these things because, we’ve learned that our hope in life is not in the purity of our character or the perfection of our performance. We can face that we’re sinners, and rest because we know that God really does exist and that he’s a God of:

Mercy
Steadfast Love
Abundant Mercy

Because he is, there’s hope—hope of forgiveness and new beginnings.