forgiveness is like sunscreen
It’s been one of those weeks.
You know the ones—a week where nothing seems to go your way and everything’s harder than it needs to be.
A few days ago, I was running late to pick up my kids from school. I’d felt frantic and near tears all day, so when it was time for me to get my extremely uncooperative five-year-old in the car, I lost any patience I had left. I snapped at her and slammed the car door, huffing to myself as I backed out of the driveway.
As we drove down our street, I could hear her sniffing in the backseat, quietly crying. My chest burned with shame over my outburst. It wasn’t my daughter’s fault we were running late, but that hadn’t stopped me from throwing out accusations and harsh judgments like handfuls of angry confetti. Like we were at some horrible bitter party neither of us wanted to attend.
I felt awful. So as I wiped the tears from my eyes, I said in a shaky voice, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn’t have yelled. I wasn’t mad at you; I was actually frustrated with myself. Can you forgive me?”
She sniffed again, but her words came fast and easy: “Of course, Mama. I forgive you.”
She was quiet for a moment, but then her little voice came from the backseat. “Do you forgive yourself?”
My eyes immediately filled with more tears as I replied, “I’m trying to, honey.” I gripped the steering wheel, ready to leave it at that.
But my Father in Heaven wasn’t done parenting me. I felt His Spirit nudge me to say something else. This was an opportunity for me to not only demonstrate truth for my daughter but also for myself—and God didn’t want me to miss it.
So I took a deep breath and said to Margot, “Yes, I do forgive myself.”
It was a backseat moment of grace, an extraordinary moment in the middle of the mundane as we drove down the road we’d driven down thousands of times before.
Sometimes grace is a hard thing for me to swallow. Probably because it just feels too good to be true.
But isn’t it? Isn’t that the miracle?
Every day I get to wake up and try again. I get to make mistakes and say sorry and ask for a do-over. And every time I reach out with my heart in my hands, Jesus Christ is already there with His arms extended, accepting and forgiving and absolutely thrilled that I’m learning. Even when sometimes it feels like I’m not.
“Of course, I forgive you,” He says. “But do you forgive yourself?”
Oof. There it is. The missing piece that makes grace so hard to understand.
In Hannah Brencher’s book, Fighting Forward, she says, “Letting go may not happen overnight. You may have to apply those feelings of love and forgiveness and hope several times a day. Forgiveness is like sunscreen—you have to apply it every eighty minutes. But you get a choice. Every single day you get to choose—old feelings that don’t deserve your energy or feelings of love and gratitude. Hope and peace.”
I don’t know what else to say today except this: you are worth forgiving. If God can see through all our pretenses and labels and false identities and love us completely, can’t we try to do the same?
He wants to forgive and He wants you to learn to do the same.
Have a happy weekend, my friends. Thanks for walking with me.
