secrets

i have secrets. i bet you do too.

i created this blog basically to provide an outlet for my thoughts when the law student tires of hearing them over and over. i let you in on my mishaps and things i (and sometimes only i) find funny, usually at my expense. things like:
-when i manage to back into someone in a parking lot. twice.
-or when i called that guy at wal-greens crazy loud enough for him to hear (according to the law student) because 1) he is a little crazy and 2) we were buying a pregnancy test and i was in no mood for him to know about it and offer his 2 cents. (it was negative and we celebrated with beers.)
-that my parents have a divorce story lifetime would die for.
-i lint-roll the rox instead of bathing her more often.
-or that once, coming back from ben in los angeles, i hitchhiked from the airport with a random family to my friend's parents' house and basically broke in to crash there, then called another friend to take me home to starkville, instead of calling second friend in the first place.
-that i secretly fear the rapture has happened and left me when i can't find anyone and no one will pick up the phone. this has happened since i was a kid and couldn't find mom at a given moment.

and those are all little funny, embarrassing things about me and my life that i choose to reveal and laugh at with you. but they are not my whole life. you can look at any blog and see pieces, images, projections of people's selves, but never the whole picture, because we are complicated and have been trying to hide unsightly parts of ourselves since adam and eve. and so i think about all the things that don't make it onto blogs, namely my own. like all those things i did in college i didn't get arrested for but could have am ashamed of. or the people i stalk on facebook, etc., for no good reason. or fights, disagreements, etc., that i have with the law student on bad days. things i have said about friends and strangers that i shouldn't, or my fears that surface when i dwell on my faults and my past, saying i am not really a good person and how i have failed as a follower of the King. those are my real secrets.

the bad news? they are not totally secret. Someone knows them all, and i cannot hide them.
the good news? Someone knows them all, and i am free. mercy, forgiveness and grace are available to me through my repentance.

adam and eve "hid" from God after their sin. but even though He called for them, He knew where they were, and He knew their sin. they felt shame and nakedness and the eternal breadth of their sin, but He provided a way. He shed the blood of an innocent animal and clothed them, and then He punished them, with banishment, pain in childbirth and other consequences. He could have scrapped the whole project (which, in fact, He did, with the flood), but He didn't. this is still true today. God still knows our sin, still knows what we keep locked in the dark, and still longs for us. He still provides a Way to remove our sin. there is nothing we can do to "earn" it, no secret that can keep us outside its redemption. and when we accept this extravagant gift, when we repent, and turn to God's love with obedience, we are free from our sin, and our secrets hold us no more.