You can fee the icy stare of sin glare at you from some unlit corner of your mind. It looks not at you, but through you, using the attachments you have to your own judgments against you even as those rights and wrongs of yesterday pile on top of your chest like an avalanche of jagged stones. Your mind takes you away to some place you’ve been before, haunting you with a memory or two of what was versus what was supposed to be. You falter, you fall, and you look up for mercy.
The stare continues. You don’t dare stare back for the monster will devour you whole. You look away, usually down, toward some invisible savior that will rescue you and take you away from it all. None comes as you try to sneak away from look, from the sin, from the very idea you gave birth to the moment you sought to hate yourself.
There is no sneaking away as the beast grabs you from within and hauls you to some magical courtroom in your mind. There voices from a past not just yours will serve as judge and jury while you play the role of your own executioner. You wonder if you will ever escape, but you know in your heart that only a miracle can keep you from the gallows you are constructing. You have feared. You have suffered. Now, you will die for it.
This sin pretends to be a mortal wound, and you pretend to be a mortal sinner. You fall into line just as you were taught. You see the evils that men and women do as a truth not unique to them, but universal to all. You feel the rush of fear-turned-anger rise up from somewhere within you and spill out of you everywhere. You see ghosts masquerading as Now replaying the same old stories in your head, telling the same old lies as if this time they will come true. So you make them true regardless of their validity. You cast a stone in the direction of a sinner who has committed no sin save being the one you love enough to fear.
Hhhhmmmmm. This grunt betrays a new understanding of the ignorance within me. I can see it as plain as the skin on my hand as it plays with me, teasing me as if I was some child and it had the only ball in town. I chuckle back, your days are numbered my old foe, and I will be coming to root you out of my Soul and replace you with an unbridled sureness in the One I love. I have a long road to walk, a mighty field to sow with something other than the weeds I have long planted. Yet I have the tools and the support from her to do so, to not only replant this field but to live long enough to reap a bountiful harvest. I just must know, and feel, and share. The dream is worth it even as it sprouts Now a hope my lungs inhale with each passing breath.
That is the beauty of Love’s forgiveness. No sin is too great, no trauma too devastating and no beast too strong to escape a touch from the one you love. No mountain is too tall or forest too thick to hide from the her loving gaze. When it’s there, you know it, and you will soon desire a new path beyond the torments of then. This path leads to the beautiful shores of Now, where you eat of the mangoes and dance in the soaked sands you have come to call home.
Embrace that and know that you have found exactly what you are looking for. Relish in her steadfastness and belief in you, and do not stray from the line of footsteps she has given you to follow. You will be grateful one day, and you will know that the sin and the sinner only existed in your mind. Then you set them free, in Love’s own forgiveness, and never hear from them again.