My Repentance

A few months ago, I was moved by what was happening around me. I wrote out a very personal and verbose repentance. I want to share that in pieces over the next few days.

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I write this not out of hatred or disdain, but out of great, discontented love. I think of it as when a person you love dearly is struggling and cannot get well. There are simple, but profound, changes the person can make, but they either refuse to see the evidence or excuse it away.

I write out of a deep love for the Church universal, and Christ’s Body. You’re welcome to disagree, to rail against what’s said here, or to ignore this entirely.

But I pray you won’t.

When one is sick, ignoring the symptoms does not rid the body of the sickness. When a house is on fire, simply talking about the flames and smoke does not put out the fire. When there is a crack in the foundation of a building, and we do nothing, the building itself begins to degrade and eventually begins to collapse.

We, as the local Western church, have become sick. We have become engulfed in flames. We started as small splinter lines, we have ignored until they become gaping fissures in our bedrock.

We have seen the symptoms, the loss of energy and strength, the change in appetite, and we have ignored it. We have gotten cold sweats, become overwhelmed by anxiety, and have lost the ability to reproduce.

We have smelled the smoke, seen the flames rise around us, and continued sitting our dinner table, enjoying a cup of coffee as if nothing was happening. While we pretend this is normal, and teach others this is normal, the scent of smoke and white ash surround us.

The small line in the cement started small. The crack is indicative of something, because no crack causes itself. We noticed it years ago, but thought nothing of it. Eventually it became part of the scenery. The ground began to slant just a bit, and the crack grew larger and larger. Years later, now we deal with both the fissure in the foundation and the problem that caused it that grew larger than we know.

(Part 2 to follow)