The Hundredth Time I Confessed It

Karim has a number in his head and the number is roughly a hundred, and he is fairly sure it is conservative.

The thing itself was twenty-three years ago. He was twenty-six. It is not the worst thing anybody has ever done and it is not the sort of thing that would make a stranger step back, and it was genuinely wrong and he genuinely did it and there is no version where he explains it away, nor does he try.

He confessed it properly at the time. Out loud, to God, and also, which took considerably more, to the one person who most deserved to hear it. That conversation went better than he deserved and worse than he had hoped, and the relationship survived it, and the whole business was, by every reasonable account, dealt with in about 2003.

He has brought it back about a hundred times since.

Not because anything new has come to light. There is nothing new. It is exactly the same event, with exactly the same facts, brought back to exactly the same God, in exactly the same words, at intervals of a few months, for twenty-three years.

It usually arrives when he is doing well. That is the pattern and he noticed it about a decade ago and has never known what to do with the observation. Something good happens, or something is going smoothly, and within a few days he is back at it, saying the same sentences to the ceiling at eleven at night.

He does not think he is unforgiven. He would say, if you asked him theologically, all the right things, and he would mean them.

He just cannot stop bringing it.

You may have your own number.

Maybe you know the exact wording you use. Maybe you have noticed, as he did, that it turns up when things are good, and that it has never once turned up with anything new attached.

What I am not going to tell you to do

Let me be careful here, because there is a bad version of this message and it does real damage.

I am not going to tell you to stop thinking about it. That is not what any of this is and I am not going to hand you suppression dressed up as faith. If a thing you did still moves something in you, that is a working conscience and it is not a fault.

I am not going to tell you it was trivial. It was not trivial to you and it was not trivial to the person you told, and a message that makes it small would be lying to you and insulting them at the same time.

I am not going to tell you to stop being sorry. You are allowed to be sorry about it for the rest of your life. Sorrow about a real wrong is not the same thing as an unsettled account.

What I am going to look at is the bringing back, which is a different action from remembering, and I think you have never had them separated for you.

What He says He has done with it

There is a sentence in Hebrews, quoted from Jeremiah, and it is God speaking about His own memory.

And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.Hebrews 10:17

Now, sit with what an odd claim that is.

It is not that He has excused them, or looked past them, or decided to be gracious about them, all of which would be understandable. It is a statement about what He has done with the record.

And the context is doing work. The whole argument of that chapter is about repetition: sacrifices offered again and again, and the writer says the repeating was itself the evidence that nothing had been finished. Then he sets against that one offering, once, and says the repeating can stop.

Which means your hundred is not extra devotion. It is the old system, running in a man who is already under the new one.

And He is not holding a record you keep resubmitting. The written word has Him saying He will remember them no more, about His own memory, in a chapter arguing that repetition is the mark of an unfinished thing, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man at eleven at night.

And what you did is not on a ledger awaiting review. The word says by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified, and the Spirit is the one who makes perfected and for ever mean what they say.

Why it comes when things are good

Now let me touch the pattern you noticed, because I think you were right to notice it and I do not think it means what you fear.

It arrives when you are doing well.

That is not evidence that you have no right to do well. It is a very ordinary thing that happens in people who have carried something: the moment the pressure eases, the thing that was being held down has room to come up. It surfaces in the good weeks because the good weeks have space in them.

That is a fact about capacity, not a verdict from heaven.

And a thought arriving is not a summons. The word says God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing you a reminder every time the pressure lifts.

And you are not being called back to the same ground. The word says being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, and the Spirit is the one who keeps a person moving forward rather than returning.