Jerry Stttser wrote:
God will redeem the past if we let him. He will redeem it by using even our worst choices and experiences to do something good. I have seen students who performed poorly in school, out of pure laziness, become excellent teachers because their own failure as students showed them why students struggle and how they best learn. I have seen abused children become effective social workers because they understand how abuse starts and how it can be reversed. I have performed the weddings of young brides and grooms who have proposed to remain true to their vows, thus changing a direction set by their parents who, for whatever reason, could not make their marriages work.
Failures can give us clues to our calling. Charles Colson, hatchet man for President Nixon, was convicted of crimes associated with Watergate and spent seven months in prison. He turned his life over to Jesus Christ just before his incarceration. But his experience in prison did not leave him bitter or full of regret. Instead it opened his eyes to the needs of prison inmates. He eventually started Prison Fellowship, a successful ministry to inmates and their families. Pope John Paul II grew up in Poland and witnessed first hand the cruelties of communism. He has become one of the most zealous advocates of human rights in the world today. When still a teenager, Joni Eareckson Tada suffered a tragic accident that left her a quadriplegic. Her book, paintings, testimony, and ministry of hope now inspire millions of disabled people.
It is easy to dismiss Chuck Colson, Pope John Paul II, and Joni Eareckson Tada as too extraordinary. But I have observed the redemptive power of God at work in ordinary people, too. One woman I know excels at encouraging others even though she lost her husband recently in an automobile accident. I correspond with a teacher who invests time and energy in troubled youth in spite of the fact that his father was brutally murdered by just such a young person. I work with a colleague who cares for more people on campus than anyone, though he came from a loveless family. I have seen these people in action and have benefited from their goodness. Each one of them are marked by something from the past they cannot change. It is not in spite of but because of past difficulties that they have become so kind and influential. ~Jerry Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000,2004) p.120-121 (continued. . . )
Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
#redeem
#forgiveness heals
