“Oh my Lord! What the heck!” I said to myself when I came home late one night and saw our whole living room and hallway were toilet-papered.
Normally, Bella would joyfully meet me at the door and jump on me as I entered. But not this time.
“Bella, where are you?” I called. At first I thought she had been kidnapped.
After a few minutes, she came to me slowly and sheepishly. She was hiding under the kitchen table and hesitatingly approached me. “Perhaps she thought I was going to spank her,” I said to myself.
I picked her up and hugged her. Bella is our beautiful dog – a white cocker spaniel.
She had taken a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom and spread it all over the living room and hallway. I thought she did it because my wife was in a hospital recovering from her stroke.
Bella was left alone in the house all day. I thought what she did was her way of dealing with the drastic change in her life’s situation.
Bella’s behavior made me believe she had anxiety and guilt feelings for what she had done.
I don’t know if dogs have guilty or anxious feelings like humans do. Psychologists say we bury anxiety and guilt in the subconscious and that from time to time, these feelings surface in a person’s life in various forms.
“Behind the frantic expressions on people’s faces are unresolved regrets,” psychologists say.
Anxiety and guilt are as old as Adam and Eve.
One evening, Adam and Eve heard God walking. They ran and hid among the bushes. (Genesis 3:8).
What happened to them? Until this point, they never felt fear or trepidation. They never had hidden from God.
They had nothing to hide. Adam and Eve until then were both naked but felt no shame. (Genesis 2:25).
Then came the snake. Adam and Eve said “Yes” to the snake and they said “No” to God.
When they did this, their world collapsed like a village swept by a tsunami. They went hiding in the bushes. They felt dread and shame. They invented cover-up schemes. Adam and Eve did not know how to process their failure.
Neither do we. But we try. We do not hide in bushes. We are more sophisticated in dealing with our failure. We numb it or we deny it, minimize it, bury it, punish it, avoid mentioning it, redirect it, offset it or embody it.
Adam and Eve hid behind fig leaves and bushes and lied. Not much has changed since then. Unresolved guilt causes anxiety. It can make a person run, deny or pretend.
Guilt can make a person miserable, weary, angry, stressed-out or fretful.
Grace can restore life in a person’s soul. St. Paul clinged to grace. Paul relied on God’s mercy.
No one had more reasons to feel guilty than Paul did. He orchestrated the death of Christians. He was a terrorist of his time. He took Christians into custody and made them spilled their blood.
Paul was like a madman. He went everywhere to devastate the lives of Christians. He entered homes, dragging men and women alike and jailing them. (Acts 8:3).
Paul had blood on his hands. Then he came to his Damascus road moment. He encountered Jesus and became blind.
Once Paul could not see physically, he also could not see the value of killing Christians any more. He could not see any reason for what he had been doing.
He could not see other options except to spend the rest of his life talking less about himself and more about Jesus.
All the things that Paul thought worthwhile were thrown away. He put his hope and trust in Christ alone. (Philippians 3:7).
In exchange, God gave Paul righteousness. He became right with God not because he followed the law, but because he believed in Christ. (Philippians 3:9).
Paul gave his guilt and anxiety to Jesus. “I am not all I should be, but I am bringing all my energies to bear on this one thing: forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead. I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God is calling us up to heaven because of what Christ did for us.” (Philippians 3:13–14).
Paul’s message: Rejoice on the Lord’s mercy. Trust the Lord’s ability to forgive. No more hiding among the bushes. Cast yourself only upon the grace of Christ.
To be happy, a person needs to be aware of the seriousness of sin and the immensity of God’s grace.
Do not diminish the gravity or the seriousness of sin, nor the ability of God to forgive. Do not dwell on guilt. Dwell in grace.
One day, we will stand before God. All of us will be present. All of us will have to account for our life – every thought, every deed, every action and omission.
Were it not for the grace of Christ, the thought of judgement could be terrifying.
But Christ came to take away the sins of the world. (John 1:29). On judgement day, when the list of my sins will be presented to the Father, I will say to the Father, pointing to Christ, “He took them!”