I am honored to open up space today for the words of Anita Mathias. Anita and I first connected in the comments section of a piece I wrote for SheLoves. A few months later she asked me to write a guest post over at her place. Clearly, we share an admiration for each other's words. Please join me in welcoming Anita to
A Lifetime of Days.
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Even
while Esau was out hunting his father’s favourite wild game, Jacob and Rebecca slaughtered
and cooked two choice young goats-- which Jacob served to Isaac, pretending to be
Esau, stealing his blessing.
A
cruel deception.
And,
uncannily, years later, in his own old age, Jacob’s sons sold his favourite son into slavery, dipping Joseph’s
precious robe in the blood of a slaughtered goat, claiming he had been killed
by a wild beast.
Tricked
with a goat, just as he had tricked his own father with a goat.
* * *
The seeds we sow, we reap, measure for measure. They lie
dormant in the earth, sometimes for years, then yield their harvest.
The
good we have done yields blessing, and the evil we’ve done conjures shadowy
forces against us.
And
that’s scary if we have sown bad seeds, have said and done less than luminous
things, things we are now ashamed of.
* * *
But
we do not live in a mechanical universe. We live in a just universe, shot
through by mercy like a golden cord.
However
there is a more powerful force still: the force of mercy, unleashed by the
willing victim who bore in his body the punishment for all the bad seeds we
have ever sown.
And
so mercy triumphs over justice. The deep magic from before the dawn of time.
* * *
For
myself, I want to sow good seed for the rest of my life.
But
the bad seed I have sown? The things I am ashamed of? The things I did because
of my small, bewildered, wounded heart?
I
confess them.
I
ask God’s forgiveness. I ask Christ’s blood to cover them.
And
I step into the waterfall of mercy, the mercy that triumphs over justice
because the One who loves the world is good.
I
ask him to let all the bad seeds I’ve sown, which are still dormant, die.
And
I ask him for grace to overplant much good seed to crowd out the bad seed.
And
I ask him, the ultimate genetic engineer, to somehow, even now, change the
DNA of the bad seed I’ve planted, and bring good from them.
And
I place my life and future in His hands.
(Photo credit: Jenny Downing)
_____________________________
Anita
Mathias is the author of Wandering Between Two
Worlds
(Benediction Classics, 2007). She has
won a writing fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts, and her
writing has appeared in The Washington
Post, The London Magazine, Commonweal, America,
The Christian Century, and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies.
Anita
lives in Oxford, England with her husband and daughters. She blogs at Dreaming Beneath the Spires.
You
can find her on Twitter @anitamathias1 or on Facebook
at Dreaming Beneath the
Spires.
