Something has been bugging my conscience as of late.
I had a visitation with my daughter at the end of May. For context, in order to be peaceful, I agreed to graduating visitation, so this was supervised.
The person supervising, either through poor judgement or poor counsel, thought that they were going to be deceptive with something. What they may not realize is that the spidey senses are a touch more perceptive these days. I recognized the anomaly within about ten seconds. I stay frosty. I said nothing.
They started out by lying about separate personnel issues. I knew it was a lie but said nothing. But then, they took the deception up to eleven by saying, "sorry sir." I still said nothing.
I finished my visitation, which was wonderful, seeing the smile on my daughter's face. I stayed peaceful, for her sake. I even reiterated my objectives about my daughter moving forward, so that people could be reminded that I want God's best for her in a crappy situation.
None of this escaped my perception. My daughter was taught, passively, that lies and deception are permissible.
That was not okay. And it did not escape God's perception either. Yet I will stay peaceful, and forgive yet another transgression. It's just more work for me to do by His grace.
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6)
Ahh, I am so glad to be done with that season of my life.
Thankfully, my work towards moving from social media back to the 2000s with blogs and selfhosted stuff is going well. Over the past month or two, I've shut down just about all social media profiles that I can recall, except for Facebook due to the family connections. I'm sure there's others, but I have to scrub through old notes to find them and get rid of those as well.
With the advent of all this AI nonsense, dealing with a dude that was a security issue, and the absolute cesspool that most sites are due to the godless, liberalized brain rot that's infests the internet -- this isn't a step backward. The vast majority of the stuff is worthless. Dead Internet Theory has more or less graduated out of its size-theory diapers. I'm looking forward to moving on, where I can shout at the internet void and only the bots will hear me.
I started this a couple of years ago to chronicle my bible study materials, back when all I was doing was looking for jobs and constantly hoovering study materials. As I got busier (and other things unfortunately had my attention), I stopped writing because I tend to waste time trying to revise, revise, and make the "best" I could do. These days, I've finally come around to the fact that -- just dumping, stream of consciousness style, works. In fact, it can be better, depending on your objectives. That way, I can look back and see the progress I've made, that I wouldn't necessarily see otherwise.
So now, this is going to be a mix of my thoughts, my notes, bible study... it's going to effectively become one of those silly E/N blog sites from the early 2000s, minus the usual blasphemy that most of them contained.
Here's to the next season in my life.
To repent is to "turn away from". It is not a passive action, it is an active walking away from that which is wrong. You do it not because it is easy, but because it is right. Repentance is almost always difficult because oftentimes it requires excision of that part of you that craves and condones that thing you need to be rid of that's slowly killing you.
This is the basis for the understanding that repentance is granted from God; it's not something that we can do. Because oftentimes, we are too blinded or myopic to recognize the things that need repenting of. And even if we are aware of them, the allure and comfort of that familiar (no matter how completely it poisons us) is so overpowering that we will willfully walk back to that comfort that we know even if we intellectually recognize the danger.
And the more you give in and feed it, the more ingrained that pathway becomes and the process is easier and easier to do, and harder and harder to walk away from.
This is what makes childhood trauma, or even just an upbringing not rooted in scripture, so dangerous. When these pathways are set within the malleable, plastic mind of a child and left to solidify, it becomes nearly impossible to rectify later in life. Proverbs 22:6: Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.
He doesn't depart from it because it has become his life; it is effectively him. And there's no way you can remove that from him without severely damaging his entire grasp of reality. He will rebel against anything that even remotely threatens this core part of his being, protecting the cancer that is killing him because the cancer is all he knows.
The only one that can surgically excise that is God. And it will be assuredly painful in a way that few truly understand. Because you will effectively lose what you believe to be yourself. God knows better though, because He knows us more intimately than that. He sees past the trauma and is willing to put you through that hell and rebuild you on the other side, for your good. And let me just say, when you can finally see clearly again, sunrises are more beautiful than you ever remember. The soft cool light of the full moon is warmer than you ever thought it could be. The genuine smile of a child is more joyful to your soul than a trillion dollars. The vulnerable bearing of a heart is enough to bring you to tears of empathy and rememberance of your own undeservedness.
When God grants repentance, on the turning away, everything changes in ways that we can never fathom until we experience them. Feeling sorry is just another insidious form of selfishness. When you're willing to ask God, even beg Him, to drive all iniquity from you no matter the cost, you won't be prepared for what He may do to bring that about. But rest assured, on the other side, you will more likely choose the turning away from what needs repenting of, rather than be willing to poison yourself with fleeting comfort that it will bring.
God is mightier to save.