Good Friday; Pet Peeve

"Seen your face in every child that smiles,
but I can't help but rejoice.
And I've heard the song called thunder,
but I knew it was your voice.
Touched the holes in your calloused hands,
stuck my fingers in your side.
oh I was six-feet-deep in doubt but
now I'm sure that you're alive."
-Dustin Kensrue, I Believe

Lately I've been worn out, tired out, and exasperated. Slightly with the church not living like the church, but mainly with myself not living like Jesus paid the ultimate cost to save me. This is a loaded statement and if you want me to unpack the facets of it (or try to), let's grab coffee sometime. Here, suffice it to say much of it has come from being kicked in the pants lately through Mark Driscoll sermons.

In one of them, he was talking about how parents must be careful to punish their children for sins, and not simply for mistakes. On Good Friday, we remember how sin renders us all wrecked, destroyed, dead...without a pulse....dead. Enter God: "But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved--and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:4-6, ESV, emphasis mine).

Needless to say, we rarely feel this dependence on Christ's atoning work; we rarely see how wretched we are and how urgently we need to adopt attitudes of repentance. Trigger my pet peeve: apologizing to others for mistakes, instead of sins. In lab today, a German visitor apologized profusely to me for mistaking me for someone else. I completely understood what she was getting at, but my stomach was knotting up. I often internally cringe when people apologize for simple mistakes (or for nothing at all such as stepping on the back of your shoe), though I understand their intentions. I think it's because I used to do it all the time...apologizing for trivial things. I did it so much I had a friend tell me I had to stop using the word 'sorry' and we made a bet to see how long I could go. I think, in this way (by apologizing for mistakes) we can 1) cheapen the act of repentance and forgiveness and can 2) avoid apologizing for the significant sins we have done to others. So I urge us, as a Christian community, let's bring 'sorry' back into 'sorry.' Let's not cheapen what it means to be repentant or we will fail to build real relationships with others and fail to understand how much we truly depend on Christ.