Redemption

We all need to be redeemed. We’ve all felt undeserving and full of fault at some point in mortality, and if we haven’t, we will… That is the nature of life. Falling down is the way we learn how to walk, slipping up is the way we learn how to say we are sorry….. forgiving and forgetting and loving and improving are born from the unhewn roughness with which we approach life in our youth….a roughness that is only smoothed and shaved away with time and a sharpened sensitivity to what roughness is and how we may remove it from ourselves.

Today, I studied a powerful portrait of the reality of redemption- and it was sweet, all-consuming, and bright as the golden lights that illuminated one of the loveliest weddings I have ever attended. Small and perfect, an intimate group of us watched a bride, a groom, and the bride’s 10-month old son come together and make vows… what we believe are promises with God, to love and care for each other forever. The faces of those in the room told volumes… a father who tried to support his daughter as she delivered a child while young and alone, a sister who had carried so many complex questions about the world and witnessed the difficult journey of her elder sibling, a groom who had waited long and through personal medical challenges to find the love of his life, the bride who had overcome heartache, loneliness, and the fear of the uncertainty that she wouldn’t find someone who loved her and her son the way she dreamed. In that moment, as the couple looked into each other’s wet, happy eyes and their little son smiled in their arms, I watched as so many hearts in the room dumped a thousand pounds of former pain, uncertainty, and discouragement into the past and left it behind forever. It was genuinely one of the most raw and precious emotional experiences I have ever witnessed.  

As the little boy finished off the statement of the promises with unrestrained and innocent “amen, amen, amen…”, I could almost feel every heart in the room bursting with the same cacophony of agreement, repeating to themselves an endless stream of silent “amens”.

This family was perfect, new, whole, and free of the challenges they had conquered. With all the turbulent news and tragedies that face us and our neighbors in daily life, this was a moment where it felt the world stood still, breathed deeply, and told me to believe better in God and the reality of redemption.  

There is nothing so broken or so helpless that it cannot be made right again with God – I know it. I’ve felt it. I’ve seen it.