Today’s readings: Click on today’s date at http://www.usccb.org/bible/
Does it hurt, when forgiveness falls from heaven?
Monday, March 31, 2014
Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Psalm 30:5
God’s anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes in the morning.
Not everyone wants to go to work on Monday morning. Bill Cosby hilariously covered some of the possibilities for weekend debauchery in one of his old skits. This in fact is Monday morning, isn’t it? How are you doing today?
I make a lot of mistakes, and many of them cost me composure or comfort. I wonder occasionally if God is as disgusted with me as I am with myself.  Rarely do I decide that he is. God in the Bible consistently returns to patience and forgiveness after just a little while.
Knowing this is true down to the core of my being makes it easier to forgive myself. Joy comes in the morning UNLESS I bury myself over and over in guilt by replaying my stupidity in my mind.
Isn’t there a penance I can pay? Of course there is. Twelve-step programs call it making amends. Or I can repeat the Lord’s Prayer a dozen times, hopefully aware that this is for me, not for God. It’s not that God is easy on me. His forgiveness “heaps burning coals on my head,” as Paul says in Romans 12.
God’s favor lasts a lifetime. That covers a multitude of mistakes, right? I can start over every single day. Nothing needs to hold me back. Can I live that way? God says yes, I can.
Father, it is you that enables me to restore, repair, recover, retrieve the child you made from the debris I make in my life. Nothing changes that, and that means I have nothing to fear. You are good, all the time.
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1261
