Love Covers Sins

Growing up. Older. Growing so far away from the sights, the sounds, the feelings, the friends, the memories of childhood. How does it even happen? How can distance and time matter so much? How can friends, best friends, good friends - friends who have shared, experienced, learned together, taught each other, so much - just end a friendship? How can the best of moments dwindle so far away, and be replaced by nothing? And how can mistakes, however egregious, completely erase everything that came before them? How can life do this to friends? Why do we let it?

I feel like my heart is raw, and I'm- I don't even know what word I'm looking for. It's not tired. It's not that I'm tired of this strange power this hurt has over me. How the bare memory of it can have me in tears from a happy mood in seconds. How I have to almost physically push the memory of friendship - friendship! - out of my mind in order to keep a reign over my emotions. I guess I've felt this before. But it felt so much more like a betrayal last time, and my decision only had to be whether or not I would let someone else's actions destroy me. This time, this time, it was my decisions that spurred on others' and I don't know that I can blame them for how they chose to react to my betrayal.

Thoughtlessness! How terrible and destructive you are. Or rather, perhaps, not thoughtlessness, but overestimation of oneself, of one's willpower. It causes so much strife-- and somehow to me this feels like Pangaea breaking again- but it's not a landmass becoming smaller landmasses in one world. It is that bundle of feelings, observations, loyalties, and loves that we refer to as our "heart." The seat of our consciousness used thought of as the stomach- probably because that's where the butterflies congregate when we're happy, and that's what sinks when we realize something that we might consider the worst has happened. My heart is downcast within me. David knew this feeling. His own betrayal of his Lord caused it within him. And I'm sure that was more than enough to be getting on with.

Love covers over a multitude of sins. I never fully understood that verse. Love and forgiveness and the ability to apply them to another person. I think that may be one of the Christian's most important and most difficult battles. To apply the commandments given to us by our Father. To make the pages of the Bible come alive in our own time- so no one can tell us that the words printed there have some sort of time limit, that they don't apply to our here and now. To prove that the Holy Spirit lives and breathes within us-- evidenced by our spirits of love and compassion and desperation in this world of pain and sin.

Sin. The ultimate divider. Broken down into so many different components, but still, above all, one thing. It's what keeps us from God. It can keep us from each other. Pride. Lust. Unforgiveness. Anger. Lack of self-control. Unbelief.

Let our actions match our words. Let us see with the eyes of God. Let us have a heart like His. Let us see the problems within ourselves and fight them, before we try to fix the ones we see in others.

Let my pain have nothing to do with bitterness. Fix my heart, Father. Let me at least say goodbye to a friendship I don't know how to heal as if nothing bad had happened, knowing that you have forgiven me, and knowing that I have sought your forgiveness. Let my pain be for sins I have not brought before you- and let me fix that problem daily. It's enough to dwell on today's problems, without bringing into them tomorrow's, or yesterday's.