redemption

but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin."
John 8:1-11

Dang. Awesome message right there.
Can you imagine these teachers and Pharisees, all haughty-like, dragging a poor woman through the crowd and presenting her to Jesus, trying to both shame her and discredit Him at the same time? How sinless and proud those men must have felt? How mortified the woman must have been? And Jesus staring at them and then casually bending down to write on the ground, with all temptation to just roll His eyes and reply, "Are you kidding me..."

Then neither do I condemn you, He says. The only one without sin. The turning point.

melting pot

Can I apologize if I've been rude to you lately? Will you forgive me so I can see your smile again?

I looked through my livejournal blog from last year, which details raw emotions fluctuating stronger than a y=10sin(10x) graph. I went to beginning of November, 2009, and was so amazed by how much I resisted God's outreaching hand, relying solely on emotions and past experiences as if there were only one way of letting Him take me in.

November 9, 2009
What kind of experience or feeling is that, of being saved? I don't think I have been saved yet because there isn't one particular moment or day that strikes me as when You truly took me by the hand and mended my wounds when I was at my lowest, not that I really had terrible traumas since knowing You...yet (never I hope).

Yesterday I talked to Pastor Seth, and he pointed out to me the narrow path I was walking on and told me about perspectives. God wants to help solve my problems. We have the same solutions in mind but for me, there are only few ways to get there from the lessons of my broken past and out of what I know. For Him, there are a billion, infinite ways to get there... out of what He knows. I only know how to serve Him through my experiences, through what I learned from my freshman year. But now He's showing me other ways to love and other ways to serve, routes I never imagined would lead to giving Him glory but do, all the same. I was shocked, the limitlessness of God once something completely non-comprehensible but now being shown in a sliver through His work in our lives. Isn't this amazing?

1 Peter 4:10 Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms.

I'm sorry for being frustrated with you, for not taking into consideration that you're trying your best to serve God too, just in a completely different way than I know. So let us all try to teach each other the best of what we know, through which we will know God's heart all the more :).