Ultimately, God’s grace gave me the courage to face my own guilt. I recognized I needed to fully confront the guilt. In many ways, I had already done that. Isn’t that the reason my guilt tormented me? I knew it was there. I knew “what” had put it there. I owned it, and I owned all the degrading, intimidating, self-limiting, God-distancing consequences of it. Confronting guilt though alone in the hidden darkness of my own thinking either produces nothing or it produces more distorted thinking. Guilt must go to God. Openly, with raw, painful honesty. Jesus died for my sin. God forgives sin because Jesus died. Why, why, why then, when I cried and I cried out to God, why did my tears continue to seemingly find God’s heart and arms closed, and I was still sitting in the turmoil of my guilt????
I believe it was because I was still listening to and responding to, the lies that had warped my thinking and my spiritual sensitivities. Yes, I needed to talk with God, but I also needed to start talking with someone who had a heart for God and a heart for me. Someone who could give me an accurate picture of God. Someone who could give me God’s truth and God’s perspective. Someone who could assure me of God’s love and forgiveness in the midst of my raw, painful honesty. Someone who could help me find the truth in my story – what I truly had responsibility for, what I was taking responsibility for and it was not mine to carry, and perhaps, what was not clearly discernible. Someone who could do all that, and then walk with me to the cross so I could give all of it to God.
Dugan’s dad also, ultimately, found his peace with God and came to a place too of being able to forgive himself. He was able to forgive himself because he came to know that for whatever responsibility he held, God had fully forgiven him. He wanted others to know his story so they too would know the reality of God’s forgiving heart.
(Related Bible reading: Psalm 32:1-5; James 5:16; Ephesians 1:6-8)