#2: Repent: #40ways40days

The word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. (Luke 3:2b-3)

Once a little boy wrote a poem called ‘The Monster Who Was Sorry.’ He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him; his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’’

‘My messy house’ says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way to repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it a place where God might wish to dwell?

© Kathleen Norris, ‘Repentance’ (excerpt). Found in Amazing Grace, Lion, 1998. Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash. #40ways40days.