Recycle Bin
By: Aga Fatrick Sta. Ana
One Sunday, the choir at my church sang an arrangement of one of most well-loved hymns of all time. My favorite part of the song says, “I was once lost, but now I am found; was blind, but now I see.”
I needed a document from my laptop today. After a few minutes of desperate searching, I realized that I had deleted it a couple of months ago. I sighed over the fact that the document is lost forever. My friends suggested that I install specific software to recover the document, but for someone like me who did not grow in the womb of technology, I had no other choice but to accept that the document is gone.
But being able to delete items is not always a bad thing. Sometimes, I forget that God’s love also erases my sins, weaknesses, frustrations, and fears like the delete function on my laptop. Sometimes, I would sit down for a moment and install software to could recover what God has erased from His memory. Sometimes, I forget that I’m already dead to sin and that the Spirit of God is the One living inside me.
One of the verses that fascinates me and touches my heart is Hebrews 8:12 which says, “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
I just can’t imagine how God would do that but He would! I can rest assured that everything that I did that I’m not proud of is forgiven and erased. Today, I can come to Him as if nothing happened yesterday, last week, last month, or ten years ago. But does that mean that I can sin all I want? To answer this question, imagine yourself as a young child who hits their mother during a tantrum. This is not a very good picture to imagine but go ahead and do it. Now, after a few minutes, you have realized that what you did was very, very wrong. You asked for forgiveness and you received it. The question is, “would you do it again?” Of course, the answer is “No.” When asked “why,” I can propose two answers: (1) because it’s wrong; and (2) because she is your mother.
The same is true with God’s forgiveness. We can’t sin again because it’s wrong and because He is our Father and hitting Him in the face is the last thing that we want to do “again.”
The writer of that hymn we sung was right. We were once lost, but now we’re found; once blind but now we see. And who would want to be lost and blind “again?”
What is/are the sin/s that you find hard to let go? How do you think would you be able to let go of it/them?
See more devotions from Fatrick and our other Young Adult writers, or find our how you can become a writer yourself at our By Young Adults for Young Adults devotion page.