I'm in the space of grieving and I know that I'm letting go of a lost childhood. You know, Purgatory may not actually exist as we know it, at least in the afterlife, but I think there is a place of purgatory within us. A place where the "I don't knows" get to go and if they behave themselves later on in our lives they get to come out and be of benefit to us. But if they misbehave they are cast out into our own personal Lake of Fire.
By behaving, I mean that they are processed and integrated well into our personal story. And this really depends on what kind of persons we become, or are becoming, as we enter into our Sunset years. This is the time where we want everything in our life to have a soft warm glow around it, we want to remember things in the best possible light, and so we allow the impact of the affects in our personal narrative to hit us differently. We've learned a lot more along the way, and we allow for a lot more "What Ifs." What if he was just as broken as I was, or even more so, What if I didn't remember it quite the way that I thought I do, What if I really was the monster in their story, What if...?
The best lens to look through our lives when looking over the shoulder and deep into our hearts, is the lens of scripture. When we have come to trusting scripture, specifically trusting God through what he says in His Word, then we begin to look backwards with a new ability to see what was there all the time, or more importantly to see Who was there all the time.
Because God is faithful and true, if we are living a kind of leaning in Christian Life, we will - through the power of His Spirit - come to embrace this truth as our own. It becomes heart knowledge where it was head knowledge. And when it becomes heart knowledge it can transform the rest of our knowledge. Wisdom has a way of transforming knowledge because it teaches us how to take what we have learned and turn it into what we can live. It also allows us to see how we have lived. It Allows us to judge ourselves through the light of scripture.
The true power of the Word of God is that it changes us to where we start to become more like Him, and then as we realize that, we desire to become more like Him. That is its very purpose. And that is God's very purpose for us. To be conformed into the Image of the Living Christ. To be a little more like Christ? No. To become a Little Christ. You-flavored Christ. Me-flavored Christ. Michael-flavored, Christ-like, Cross-bearing, Son of God. That Kind of Christ.
One of the most important things we begin to see is that His presence was already in our lives. I'm able to read this because I'm still alive. I know that the purpose of the devil is to steal, kill and destroy, emphasis on kill. And not only does he want to kill us, he wants to destroy any possible good that could have come from our lives. But the devil couldn't succeed, because of the protecting presence of Jesus in my life, even from the very beginning, in my mother's womb. He kept me then, He will keep me now.
This part of my forgiveness Journey is a marked way to begin to reclaim the unprocessed areas of my life, to enter boldly into the places that I simply had left in purgatory. In reclaiming these areas of the past, I'm able to prepare for my future. Because I want to be That Kind of Christ while I yet live.
