an elephant sitting on my soul

Last week, I messed up royally.  Totally failed.  Sinned.  Perhaps I am more aware of it for the sheer fact that it is not a sin I commit regularly, or perhaps I am aware of it for the seriousness of it.  I’m not sure.  Because you know that the sins we commit every day do not weigh on us heavily.  The guilt not there yet.  The conviction not transforming us into something new.  But the weight of it was heavy.  Heavy knowing that I could not carry it on my own.  The guilt of my sin bearing down on me.  Closing in on me.  Suffocating me, like an elephant sitting on my soul.

Is this what it is like to need a Savior?  That He would lift the load of guilt separating us and allow me to breath again.  To be made new again.  I am not one to process things immediately, so it was a few days before I understood the guilt and then reconsidering the conviction, the area of which I needed to take to God to heal and set free.  Why God chooses to use us messy sinful people I’ll never totally understand.  Why God chose to create us even though He would die to set us free?  Only Love.  A Love so deep and wide and high.  Deep.  Wide.  High.  Bigger than BIG.  Breathing it in.  Breathing it out.  There it is here in the moment.  A greatness and a mysteriousness.

I’ve always been one of those people intimidated by BIG statues, not really wanting to be in the presence of something so big, so larger than life, so real, and not real.  Ever reminding me that I am small.  And even smaller in comparison of the bigness and fullness of God.

It was only a slight slip of the tongue, my mistake so small in how it happened, so large in what I did.  SO crucifiable.  But I am covered.  Covered by the blood, and He has redeemed even this slight slip of the tongue.  This mistake, small, yet large and heavy.

Speaking of covers, I never fully understood how important they are.  I never totally understood the discretion of covers.  How I should cover up the mistakes of my children – that that is gentleness.  Oh, me, who is supposedly gentle is learning not to be a ruffian but to treat them with a gentle grace, like my Savior does for me.  Oh Lord, I drink in the Blood, the blood that covers me.  It satisfies me and quenches my thirst.  And tomorrow, new mercies and things to learn await.