Dear Peggy.
You may not have any recollection of me…but I
remember you: your petiteness , your hair and even your voice.
One day we were out with your mother somewhere (this is, I believe, when
we were in grade school) and we were talking about God. I told you that you could be sure that you
were going to Heaven if you would ask Jesus to save you …and if you confessed
your sin. You said you wanted to do
that…..and so we prayed together in your mom’s car.
Here’s where the story goes wrong.
The next day we talked and I was desperately
trying to make you understand that Christians live and act a certain way. We do not take the Lord’s name in vain….etc.
etc. In my legalistic understanding of
salvation back then…
I think of you often, when my failures come back
to haunt me. And I pray that God brought
you someone else to erase the angry God I introduced to you….and showed you the
face of grace and love that the Father has toward you. I pray that, where I blew it, God came
through and met you where you are….hopefully not stuck in a life of
atheism. I pray that God will miraculously
show you this letter --somehow and that you would be able to see that my error
as a child was NOT the way God would have had it. I myself did not get out of that box until I
was in my 30’s not entirely anyway. God
passionately loves you and he wants your acts of faith to be exactly that OF
FAITH…not jobs you are doing to keep an angry God happy. And when you fall and fail (as you will because
you are human) GRACE is there waiting to pick you up and dust you off. God’s ears are loving and open to hear your
confession and he will take your failure, wash it in the blood of Jesus and
cast it into the deepest sea where neither you nor he will ever see it again.
This is not a life of “attempt, fail: repeat.” God’s love for you on the cross breaks that chain
of failure and defeat and the self hatred and pain that comes along with
it. It is the enemy of your soul that
tells you those lies…that you will
never, ever “get it”….that you will only be a disappointment to God for ever
and always.
Here are some verses: words from the very Word
of God and they were written by God with you in mind, Peggy.
and
you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
for
all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
All
we like sheep have gone astray; we
have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the
iniquity of us all.
John
10
14 “I
am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me, 15 just
as my Father knows me and I know the Father. So I sacrifice my life for the
sheep.
Luke
15:4
“If
a man has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he
do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness and go to search
for the one that is lost until he finds it. NLT
Ephesians
2:8-9
God
saved you by his grace when you believed.
And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is
not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about
it. NLT
So Peggy…..and
all the Peggys out there: To everyone who was sold a bill of goods called “legalism”
which implies that we have some role in earning or meriting our salvation:
please read these verses and consider them to be a handwritten invitation by
the Lord of the Universe himself, written to you. He loves you infinitely….and he wants
you to have a second chance (or more). He wants you to know there
is never a limit on his grace. It is like a steady stream of water.
One stream flowing with ever new water.
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