Skips

Our neighbour has just rented a skip. A dumpster in American. He’s using his self-isolation, his wife tells us, to clear the attic. When he asked her if she wanted to keep anything from the attic, she shook her head. ‘If I’ve not missed it for the twenty or thirty years it’s been there, I don’t need it.’

The ramifications of enforced home time are wide. De-cluttering is a good thing. Throwing it all into a skip? I don’t know what he has in his attic, but I hope that if it still has a life in it that would benefit someone else, he will save it for the charity shops when they open again.

It would be nice, I was thinking, if we could rent a skip in which we could throw all our sins, all our memories of things done by or to us which crowd and shadow our thinking and stunt our spiritual growth.

But of course, we don’t need to rent one. Jesus has provided that skip. He invites us to confess our sins – which he forgives and forgets. He invites us to forgive those who have sinned against us. Gone. He hung on the cross to win us the freedom to hang out with him forever.

It’s so hard to really take this in. It’s easy to confess a sin, receive his forgiveness, and then stew in a guilt he doesn’t want us to have. It’s easy to forgive someone else and yet still rehearse the hurt in my head. As I prepare to walk through Holy Week with Jesus in a different way this year, one of my prayers will be to really accept his forgiveness, so that spiritually, I can stretch out into an airy, open space and grow, no longer shaded and cramped by what God has forgiven and forgotten.