On sin and salt water....

I was searching this morning for an analogy. See one of my pet peeves is the saying, "Forgive and forget." Because I find it literally IMPOSSIBLE to forget the big hurts in my life. I think I am a pretty forgiving person. In fact, on occasion, I have been accused of being too forgiving. However, STILL I have never been able to transition from forgiveness into that state where I literally do NOT remember the offense. I just don't think it's possible. Hence why that statement peeves me.

This morning I was trying to come up with one of my famous analogies to explain the fact that even though a sin is forgiven the consequences of it still remain. It's still a part of you. I was sorting through comparisons like oil and water which I didn't really like because to some extent the sin we dabble with is more completely dissolved in us, more like salt dissolves in water.......

When I hit puberty, I started losing my knobby kneed, emaciated look in a BIG way. My gymnastics coach took notice of this and began lecturing me on how fat I was becoming. My response was to request bathroom breaks from gymnastics practice to go to the bathroom and make myself throw up. My disorder grew throughout high school and college, crescendoing when I was in Denver for my first teaching job. It was there that through counseling and eventually a miraculous healing that I conquered my eating disorder. However, even still I carry with me a little bit of that 13-year old girl in a leotard bending over the toilet. Now in a season of life where I have lost control of my fitness and weight I still am haunted by her. Even still if I overeat, I am tempted to shove a toothbrush down my throat. Even in healing I am somehow a bit different than someone who never forced herself to throw up to try to be thinner.

I was searching for the analogy to illustrate this enigmatic quality of sin, when I came up with the salt in water concept. I started working it. When we taste of forbidden fruit, when we dabble in sin, it's like pouring salt into a glass of water. The salt dissolves and even if we stop sinning, even if we stop pouring more salt in the water, the salt is still there. It's a part of us. When all of a sudden from out of NOWHERE God hit me with a science lesson out of the kids Abeka text book. They had to boil salt water to learn that salt from the ocean doesn't evaporate. I heard God whisper to me, "I can boil you. You will become a water vapor leaving your salty sin behind." WOW! It ministered to me in ways I cannot explain. And it reminded me of a truth from my very favorite movie EVER (Facing the Giants), "With God all things are possible!" He can remove the salt of sin from my life. Whether I poured that salt in on my own or whether someone else poured it into me, God can REMOVE it. It won't be easy. The analogy of being boiled away does not seem like a walk in the park to me; however, "desperate times call for desperate measures."

So if you have sin in your life, and it feels like you just can't get the last of the saltiness out, ask Him to boil it away. It won't be easy. It won't be comfortable. You'll never be the same... but isn't that what you wanted in the first place?