God’s Loving Kindness

We’re about two months away from high school and college graduation season. There’s an online company called BrandYourself that claims it has the perfect graduation gift for high school and college students. It’s called the “Student Makeover.” It’s not a beauty and grooming service. It’s an online service for cleaning up your social media profiles. For $99, the company will scour all your social media profiles—Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.—and remove what it calls, “risky online references to sex, alcohol, drugs, politics, religion and more.”

The company also does an in-depth search of the Internet to compile a “reputation score” for each client. The reputation score shows you how “clean” or “questionable” your online reputation is, and what steps you can take to delete troubling posts or pictures.

I understand that a growing number of college recruiters and job recruiters use a young person’s social media accounts to decide if they’ll offer you college admission or a job, so cleaning up your social media account is becoming big business these days.

Most of us know what it’s like to do some foolish or crazy stuff in our younger years. Those of us who grew up in a time before social media can leave those regrets in the past because there aren’t a lot of photos or posts about it.

I was fortunate that one of my stand-out moments occurred way back in 1985, when there was no social anything – just MTV. You see, Thursday nights were $1 pitcher nights at the college student union pub. So my fellow ROTC cadets and I would meet there religiously. During one of these social gatherings, I found myself using the restroom at the same time as one of my fellow cadets.

We got a bit boisterous, and my compadre decided to punch the wall because, well, it was there and he could. But his fist did not have much of an effect.  So I decided to show him what a real man could do.  And I was quite successful.  But my timing was a bit off, since the student union manager happened to enter the restroom at the exact moment my fist was plunging through the drywall.

I ended up paying for the repairs to the tune of $300, which I could see was pure extortion and hush money at the time.  But since there were no smart phones, there was no video of the incident and nothing went viral. So my reputation stayed intact and I kept my good standing in my Army ROTC unit.

But these days a person’s whole life, every random thought and emotion and insensitive joke and embarrassing picture, can wind up online. And it’s nearly impossible to take this stuff back, unless you hire a company like BrandYourself to delete most of it. So be careful.

But even if you, personally, are careful, your friends and family can post all kinds of embarrassing things about you online, and you have little control over it. There’s even a term for parents who post too much information about their children online. It’s called “sharenting.” Legal experts say that someday adult children may take their parents to court and sue for damages due to their embarrassment at having their whole, messy, awkward childhood exposed online without their consent.

Professor Kate Eichorn wrote a book about the dangers of the online world called The End of Forgetting. In her book she says that our online information means we can’t ever forget the past or distance ourselves from it.

In an interview about her book, she said, “My point is that there is something liberating about being able to forget the past and reinvent yourself in the present. Much of growing up, I would argue, is about reinventing yourself multiple times, and that requires being able to forget who you were six months ago, three years ago, 10 years ago. So forgetting is ultimately about freedom.”

Forgetting is ultimately about freedom. I think there’s truth to her statement. In what ways does our past define us? In what ways does it inspire us or hold us back? And what does it mean to be set free from our past?

We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory and perfection. All of us. No exceptions. No “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Your ethnic and religious heritage can’t save you. Your good deeds can’t save you. Your status can’t save you. And that would be the end of the story for all of us. Except . . . that God had in mind a different ending for each of us.

In early May 2019, before the final episode of Game of Thrones was broadcast, more than 650,000 people signed a petition on the website Change.org demanding that the writers and producers of the show re-do all of season 8 because they were disappointed with how the story was ending.

That brings to mind Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers, who admitted that he wrote more than 39 endings for his famous novel, A Farewell to Arms, before he finally completed it. And he kept all those story endings in a notebook. Eighty-seven years after he published this novel, a museum put on a display of all the alternate endings to his book so Hemingway fans could see how much work he put into his writing.

God only wrote one ending to the story of humanity. God knew we could not achieve holiness on our own. We cannot earn a place in God’s kingdom on our own merits. So before the creation of the world, God knew He would come Himself in the person of Jesus Christ and give us His holiness in place of our sin. He would die to give us eternal life. And this overwhelming gift is given to all those who believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

Through our faith in Jesus Christ, we have been set free from our sins.  In legal terms, we have been pardoned. When Jesus gave us his righteousness in place of our sin, he deleted our past and restored our full rights as citizens of God’s kingdom.

Have you ever noticed the red doors on the outside of many churches, including St. Andrew’s? Have you ever wondered how they happen to be red?  In earlier days, it was understood that a soldier could not pursue an enemy who had entered through the red doors of a church. The red doors were a symbol of refuge and sanctuary for all who entered. The red on the doors signified the blood of Christ that had been shed so that all who came to him could be saved. Anyone who passed through those doors was safe as long as he or she stayed behind them.

When we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, then we pass through the red doors. We are safe from the power of sin and death. Jesus’ blood paid the debt of our sins and bought us access into eternal life with God.

And so we live in the hope and joy of God’s loving-kindness. This grace gives our life meaning and purpose, even when we go through doubts and failures and suffering. God can use every part of our lives, even the sins and suffering of our past, for God’s glory. That’s why Paul tells the Roman believers to glory in their sufferings. Our suffering is no longer about us. With God’s grace, our suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. Jesus suffered, died and rose again to show us that God is working out His glory and His plan in every circumstance of our lives.

St. Paul tells us that even when we see no beneficial results, at least with God’s help we can keep growing. Nothing that happens in this world is in vain if we will entrust it to God. Many people will testify that the most important lessons they learned in life were learned through adversity. They trusted God, they learned their lessons, and they achieved more than they ever dreamed possible.

So “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”