about guilt

Since my second year of college I've been to Nicaragua 9 times.  I don't even know how I've managed to make that happen, but somehow I keep finding myself back there, back to one of the poorest countries in the world and then I find myself leaving it again.

The leaving is particularly hard.  Not just because I miss my relationships there and what they've meant to me, but because I go back to a life outside one of the wealthiest cities in the world where I live an existence almost all of the friends I've made in Nica could never imagine living.

The leaving is hard because I go back to guilt.

One day, on my most recent trip, I remember a moment when the feeling totally overtook me. I just felt, to put it frankly, that my life was complete bullshit.  I felt dirty. I felt like a hypocrite.  I felt disgusted, that I could care so much about the issues of poverty and abuse for a few weeks out of the year and then return to my bubble life of convenience and niceties.

Guilt does this thing where it points our eyes only to our shame and our failures. Our perspective becomes very, very small.  Somehow, it constructs for us this ugly shack inside our hearts where mold is growing and the windows are broken and the yard hasn't been tamed and it says "you stay in here. and don't come out."

Guilt originates within us.  But lucky for us, redemption does not. 

The more I've wrestled with guilt in the past years the more convinced I become that it is not a healthy motivator.  It is really freaking impossibly hard for me to believe this, but on good days I remember the truth that God does NOT use guilt to make us better.  For the most part, the only thing the world likes to tell us is that we need to eat less and work out more and wear better clothes and be funnier but He just doesn't. He has so much more to say.

He makes us better by asking us to look at Him.  Most of the time (and ALL of the time when we're feeling consumed by guilt) all we can see is ourselves; but God transforms us by putting his beauty before our eyes and by promising us that we'll get there, one day.

He calls us from our shacks of guilt and invites us into the most beautiful home we could ever imagine. And more than just having us for dinner he actually promises that THIS is the place where we belong.

Listen y'all - I have been there.  I know what it's like to be ashamed of what you've done or haven't done.  But let's (and I need y'all in this) please please stop with the guilt.  Our eyes should be focusing on a much larger picture than that.