Just like I will never forget the birth of any of my children, I will not ever forget what happened to me two years ago today. How life was given to me. This time, not through the birth of one of my own children. This time, the birth came about in my own heart. Just as Christ was put to death on Good Friday all those years ago, my old self was put to death two years ago. Though I had been a Christian for as long as I can remember, and while I knew of God, I didn't KNOW God. I didn't understand the hope that has now shaped how I live my life now. I lived my life alone and sad, though surrounded by life and family and what should have brought me great joy. I was desperate to find fulfillment, a way to fill the emptiness I felt deep in my heart. So I tried to fill that void in many different ways, the last of which nearly destroyed my own heart and my marriage.
But...GOD!
Because, as I have recounted before, Good Friday in 2012 was a very significant day for me. It was the day that I finally let go of my shame and my guilt. I stopped punishing myself for the sin that held me captive. I stopped convincing myself that everyone was forgivable but me. That God held out hope and joy and restoration to everyone except me. I was so deceived that I tried foolishly to convince myself I was unworthy of even God's love. As if I could somehow prevent him from loving me? Seriously? I was such an idiot...to think that I could sway God one way or another into loving or not loving me. I look back now and think, how arrogant was I to think that?
But the good news is that God chose to shake me loose from my self-loathing and stripped away the lies that I had spent years believing. The lies that God didn't love me quite as much as he loved everyone else or that my sin was just too bad for him to bear. I was such a fool. And I am so incredibly grateful that I can look back now and say that! I've never been more happy to realize what a fool I was. Because that is who and what I WAS! It is not who I am today and this fills me with just as much joy, maybe more, as what I had at the birth of each of my children. Because I was given new life as well.
And while I may have shared this song before, and it is likely I will share it each year on this day, I want to post this here. Because it is not only a song that hits home for me; it is a song that each of you can listen to and hear God's truth in. Jesus' death on the cross, his resurrection, it brought DEATH TO DEATH! It put death in his grave! That is good news for us and something that I never want to take for granted!!
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