Reconciliation

I'm trying to learn how this works, slowly but surely.

I think that Faith is a bit like a balloon that you carry around with you and the world is full of sharp objects (sin) that all aimed straight at your balloon.  Walk too close and you might find your balloon pierced, cut or ruptured entirely.

This is what happened to me recently when I fell into a classic sin of selfishness.  Immediately, I realized what I had done and that it was a sin and like the pierced balloon I immediately felt deflated.  My normal routine following a sin is Guilt followed by Shame followed by Anger (at myself but can manifest into anger at others) and Frustration. 

I felt very much like the girl who asked her grandfather how she could reconcile with a friend with whom she had had a very nasty fight and he replied "Take a pillow down to the sea shore and tear it open.  Remove every single feather from the pillow and throw them into the ocean.  Then put all of the feathers back into the pillow."  The girl exclaimed "That's impossible" to which the grandfather could only gravely nod in agreement.  Impossible for Men, yes, but nothing is impossible for God.

I realized that there was nothing that I could do to put the situation right, and so I simply gave up.  I gave the problem to God and asked humbly for his forgiveness for my sin and to help heal the wound I had inflicted.  CS Lewis wrote in his book, "Mere Christianity", that (paraphrasing) reconciliation is not what God requires of you in order to be forgiven, it is merely what being forgiven feels like to a human being.

I don't know if my sin was completely forgiven or if the sin I had committed was completely wiped clean, but I do know that I no longer felt the Guilt, Shame, Anger, or Frustration and I most certainly did feel a sense of reconciliation with the party I had offended.

The Walk is a long, slow journey.  But I feel like I'm still walking, and that's a good thing.