Bad Boy, Bad Girl!

Growing up, I experienced a lot of 'shame and blame,' especially when I blew it, making an error or mistake.   My folks, and others, meant well, but a re-occurring declaration from childhood was: 'bad boy!'

Was that your experience?  It is for a lot of us, because we have known shame and blame, albeit inadvertently, unintentionally.  

Thus, I have a theory:  a lot of shamed, blamed people sit in churches; but even more shamed, blamed people don't sit in churches.  Why?  Because a lot us don't believe there's any power, powerful enough to address our 'less than ideal,' 'disgraceful,' ways. 

But scripture, begs to disagree:  “…There is no condemnation [no disgrace, guilt, blame]… [if we] are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit of life [has] set me free, [lifted me out of the old vicious circle] of sin and death.” (Romans 8:1-2) – wiping the slate of my messy, jumbled life – clean!

           

Growing up, I had a lot of favorite toys:  my Emmet Kelly clown doll – my Davy Crockett Coon Skin Hat – my Superman costume, complete with blue tights and a red cape.  But my all time favorite toy was my Etch-A-Sketch.  Remember the Etch-A-Sketch?   Why by twisting the Etch–A-Sketch’s two knobs you could draw almost anything:  circles and lines and boxes and figures of all kinds. 

 

But you know the best part of my Etch-A-Sketch?  If I didn’t like what I had drawn – if I made a mistake – all I needed to do was shake the Etch-A-Sketch and it all disappeared!  I’m not sure how it worked, but all I had to do was shake my Etch-A-Sketch, and all the stuff I didn’t like, all my mistakes – disappeared. 

God wants to shake us up; God wants to make all our mistakes disappear.  But we must allow God to grip us and rattle our lives.   

Let God grip you and rattle your life, wiping your mistakes and mess, clean.  

For there is no condemnation, no disgrace, guilt, blame, as we allow God, in Christ to clean-up our lives.  For "...great is [God's] love...as far as the east is from west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us...As a Father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.."  (Psalm 103:11-13).