Guilt

My first friend in elementary school was Sarah. As two magnets are drawn to each other, so are outcasts because the playground is one place that a child dare not stand alone. Sarah and I became quick friends. I never really understood why she was an outcast like me, because she seemed so perfectly normal. As our friendship grew so did my confidence and I started to make other friends. As most elementary school friendships do, Sarah and I got caught up in the vicious cycle of being best friends, “breaking up”, spreading cooties and being best friends again all within the course of a week. During one of the “cootie spreading” days, Sarah and I had a fight. The fight was astronomical (well at least for someone in the primary grades) and it ended in a “Fine!” “Fine!” and I watched her walk away.
That night little Sarah was walking to catechism and was hit by a drunk driver, her brothers watched on powerless to help her. She died shortly after in surgery, her little body just couldn’t handle the injuries. I don’t even want to think about the surgeon who had to deliver the news to her awaiting parents. I can’t even imagine the words that fell to the floor that night or the cries of pain that were lifted into the heavens as the news circulated our tight-knit community. That is the first time I remember feeling a sense of guilt. It was hard not having Sarah at school the next day. I crawled underneath my bed and asked Jesus if He would let her come back just like He did, but He didn’t and I had to go to school and listen to all the school bullies and people that I had called my “friends” talk about how glad they were that she was dead.
I was angry and confused, mad at my friends and mad at Jesus for taking her away. But most of all I was angry with myself for not remaining true to my best friend. I felt horrible. Guilt has this way of gnawing away at your innards. It’s like the Ebola virus. At first you don’t notice it, but it creeps up on you and tears apart your insides and there is no cure. While I sat at her funeral I wondered if people could see right through my shallowness. I felt like Lenin on the judging block for all the world to see. I wondered if everyone around me could smell the guilt as it seeped from my pores.
You would think that I would have learned my lesson, that I would embrace Jesus and not care about what people said or how they acted. Instead, I am ashamed to say that the opposite is true. I carried on in my ways of “cootie spreading” and deceiving all the while I feeling the guilt of what happened with Sarah eat me from the inside out.
It wasn’t until years later that I was able to grasp the concept of God’s grace and how He released me from carrying around guilt the moment He sent His son to the Cross. The fact is that His grace covers all…even fights in the playground. Could you imagine all the free time we would have if we just embraced the grace of the Father? God’s grace is a mystery that even the most intellectual human being could only hope to grasp. His grace acts as a Sherpa, carrying our baggage and leading us to our destination. His grace allows us to be weak because we cannot accept help when we are proud.
God is funny in the way that He relentlessly pursues us. After all we have done and all that we do, He still stands there calling us home. At the end of the day it is Him that whispers in our hearts “Come back to me, my child. I love you.” Sometimes we don’t hear the whispers and sometimes we do. Nevertheless they are there and it doesn’t take much to slow down and let the whispers fall from the sky and cradle us bringing us back to the loving arms of God.