I used to drive by my high school boyfriend’s house almost every day. He doesn’t live there anymore, so it’s not like I was stalking him. It’s just that used to work near the house he grew up in and it’s on a street I would often take to go get coffee or have lunch at a nearby restaurant.
Back when I passed his house all the time, I thought a lot about both who I was and who I desperately wanted to be back in high school. I made many poor decisions in that particular relationship because I knew deep down that I liked this boyfriend more than he liked me. It may be in the teenagers’ job description to make stupid choices, but I still wince when I think about how much power I voluntarily surrendered out of fear that he would someday want to move on from our high school melodrama. To be fair, I also remember some wonderful times of significance and happiness and, of course, the words to countless 80’s pop rock songs.
Sometimes it seems like certain people from our past have a power over us that increases when we think about them and always makes us feel a little bit like the person we were when we were closest to them. No matter how much time has passed, a phrase or a scent can bring it all back in an instant. Often this phenomenon is associated with bad memories; “I feel like a little kid when she yells at me that way.” But it can also apply to good experiences, like how whenever I smell a certain perfume I think of nights spent at my grandmother’s house when she would come in after I went to bed and lean over me as she snuck me a cookie.
When I think about the Psalm that says: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has God removed our transgressions from us,” I think about my old boyfriend’s house. I think of it as if it’s a transgression, and like God drives by it sometimes. Probably not as often as I did, because I am addicted to guilt and to coffee, and to change my route to either would have required more effort than I could manage most days, but every once in a while he drives by my past. He knows what it is, and what it means, but it doesn’t affect him in a negative or debilitating way. It doesn’t change how he feels about me. If anything, when he looks at it he doesn’t see that house as much as he sees the parts of me that were even then, and are even now, being renewed and redeemed day by day.
People often say God forgets our sins, and can’t remember them even if we try and remind Him. I think this sounds nice in a Hallmark-card commercial kind of way, but also a little bit like God has a form of Sin Alzheimer’s, and that makes me nervous. My grandfather had Alzheimer’s, and he also couldn’t be trusted to remember the important things, like where he lived or the days his kids were born or the name of his wife. I want to know God remembers that stuff. Also, a lot of my sins are not just what I’ve done, they’re part of who I am. I am a person who fears, who manipulates, who avoids and protects herself with humor. To focus just on the outward actions misses what is actually most important; the motivations of my heart. Sin is more than an awkward adolescent phase that can be outgrown. It’s not acne. It’s a sickness of bone, more than skin, and despite the illness that runs deep in our marrow, God loves us as a parent loves a teenager.
I want to get to a place where driving by my old boyfriend’s house makes me more grateful than regretful. Grateful in the “I-can’t-believe-I-won-the-lottery-twice” kind of way, because God knows everything about me and chooses me still. Both God and I remember this lopsided high-school relationship, yet God is able to see and even now carry out the bigger picture of what that relationship began in me. I want to see my growth and change like God does, as a process rather than an event.
When I drive by my old boyfriend’s house, instead of feeling ashamed about the night we took his mom’s convertible to buy schnapps and then “stargaze” on private property, I wish I felt the loved, powerful feeling that I feel every time I hear the song that my husband says reminds him of me. Instead of smiling ruefully as I pass that symbolic driveway, I could chuckle with the wonder of one who has been set free. Then that house could be an Ebenezer; it could be like a touchstone that reminds me of God’s redemptive grace in a visual and tangible way.
We are all in process. We travel the path of life without knowing exactly where it leads or when it will end for us. I’m so grateful that the map-maker knows the transgressions and the detours that take us past certain places (or houses) that he’d rather we not go. He’s never surprised by anything, and he’s available to help us re-calculate the route if necessary. Anytime.
What areas of your life are being redeemed, even as you pass them by?
Are You Leading The Life You Want?
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