I stepped… slowly at first, then intentionally letting go…
releasing myself into the cool water, allowing it to rush over me until I was
fully submerged. I rested there for a moment, covered completely by the water,
my senses fully aware of this covering.
Slowly coming to the surface,
I chose freedom.
I left the bondage
below the water, drowned beneath.
I swam forward with new vigor. I took each step up from the
water with growing joy and adrenaline. A burden that had once seemed part of
me—accompanied by a hopelessness that I would never shake free from
it—was no longer mine. With His help, I
had emerged from the water without it…
I had emerged from the water free.
It’s not that this freedom wasn’t already mine. But I had
been living as if it weren’t. Why would
I, one offered freedom, walk in bondage? But I had been. It had been
surreptitiously suffocating me. I was drowning by my own choosing. The tragic
irony of a free slave… living as one I was not.
But no
longer! For today I claimed His promise over me, a promise that was already
mine, but that I needed to receive once again:
“I will sprinkle clean water on
you, and you shall be clean…and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I
will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will
remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I
will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statues and be
careful to obey my rules….And you shall be my people, and I will be your God” (Ezek.
36:25-28).
My idols… fashioned by unbelief. Unbelief that He was
enough—enough to hold me through the devastating grief of death, enough to love
me through the crushing heartbreak of rejection, enough to fill the void of the
crippling oppression of isolation, enough to be my identity. That unbelief drove me into the arms of others,
seeking something I could see, touch, cling to, believe in… But my search for
satisfaction left me in shambles.
It left me in shame.
And today I left that shame under the
water.
“Remember that I’ve been forgiven
for this sin so I’m not consigned to commit it over and over again” (Elyse
Fitzpatrick, Because He Loves Me).
“No sin can be crucified in either
life or heart, unless it first be pardoned in conscience, because there will be
want of faith to receive the strength of Jesus, by whom alone it can be
crucified. If it be not mortified in its guilt, it cannot be subdued in its
power” (William Romaine, The Life, Walk
and Triumph of Faith).
So I let go. I let myself sink under that water and break out again into freedom. I let
myself feel and accept the cleansing that was already mine. I
released the shame, the guilt, the identity that I had accepted as my own. By
the grace of God, I let them go under that water… and by the grace of God, I
will leave them there.
I am free.
By His blood.
I am clean.
Through His Son.
I am shameless.
In
His purity.
I am not who I once
was.
