Blog 400 – 09.10.2016

The word translated “sin” in the New Testsment comes from an idiom that literally means “missing the mark.” The image is of shooting at a target and missing the bullseye. A trespass or a sin is merely a mistake and we all make mistakes. A joke I heard years ago comes to mind, “I thought I was wrong once but I was mistaken.”

If you have been following my blogs you realize that most if not all have at least one mistake in them. I wish I could say, like the ancient Japanese artists I referred to in one blog, that I put them there on purpose to remind myself I am not perfect. I need no such intentional reminders as I do that to myself quite often without trying to. Yes, English teachers, that was a dangling preposition.

Someone pointed out to me that I had misspelled encouraging in the line at the top of each one of my blogs. How embarrassing and I wasn’t sure I could fix it especially if I had made the error in my domain name. That would have been a costly mistake “encourgaging” indeed as I would have incurred some gagging to choke down a seventy five dollar typo. After poking around I figured out how to correct the mistake and it even corrected the mistake on all of the previous blogs. So I learned something and isn’t that really how we learn bytrial an error.

Don’t let a mistake trip you up. And by all means don’t let a mistake in one of my blogs turn you off or prevent you from finding the encouraging word I intend each of them to be. Many a life has been ruined because a person made a big mistake, perhaps in their youth, and thought they had committed “the unforgivable sin.” There is no such thing, but if you never forgive yourself it may seem like it to you. A phrase I like to repeat often is, Let yourself off the hook and the rest of us too.

A bumper sticker I used to see a lot read:

“Christians are not Perfect just Forgiven”

That bumper sticker used to really bother me because the church I grew up in taught Christians were to live a sinless life, grant you their definition of sin was, “A willful transgression of God’s law.” However you define sin trying to live a perfect life creates far more hypocrites than saints I am afraid because it is a pretty impossible task. I don’t think being a Christian gives you a free pass to cheat people in business or to think you are better than anyone else just because you said, “Forgive me.” And yet there is a peace that comes and a proper ordering of things when we truly forgive ourselves and others for our sins, mistakes, trespasses, whatever you choose to call them. I believe the Divine not only forgives but forgets. Love, according to First Corinthians Chapter 13, does not keep a list of wrongs.

Have a great day and do yourself a favor overlook at least one mistake today, yours or some one else’s.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White