rules

Shifting.
I kind of feel like I am shifting, changing, constantly on a journey. I don't know what my destination is. Some would scoff at this. " I know where I am going, my destination is heaven," They say.
Heaven.
But what is heaven?
All I know is that my God, my precious Jesus will be there.
But won't heaven be a continuation of the journey?
Heaven isn't a destination for me. I live, I cry, I laugh, I love. I die, I'm in heaven. Things always move from glory to glory, getting better.
I don't believe in regrets.
I believe in repentance, and trust. There is no room for regrets in my life. If I were going to waste my time regreting my past, how would I ever find the time to enjoy my present?
I believe in learning from everything. I think that Jesus works everything together for good. Even the things that could be seen as mistakes.
It really hit me today. I was thinking about the rules that GOd laid out for us. I was thinking about his rule about fornication. I broke that one. The one thing in my life that I would change if I could. The one thing in my life that hurt me more than anything has ever hurt me... was breaking that rule.
I thought that Jesus would hate me because of it. I thought that he made the rule, therefore when I broke it he would be standing there with a hammer, ready to punish me. He would call me disgusting. He would spit on me, he would look at me as worthless.

And then it dawned on me.

He made that rule for me, not against me. He made it so that I would hopefully not hurt myself. The fact that I broke that rule did not affect the way he saw my value in the least. He stood beside me and cried when I struggled, cried when I fell, cried when I got up and saw the dirt stains that covered me. And then he cried while he washed them off.

He doesn't make rules to be hard on me. He doesn't make rules so that he can decide how good I am by how many of them I keep and how many I break. He makes them to protect me.

Picture that you are a father or a mother. Your child comes up to you, and asks if she can touch the fire that is crackling away in the fireplace. " No, certainly not!" you answer her.

Did you make that rule to keep something from her that is good? Of course you didn't, you made it to protect her from getting burned!

I have learned that is how God is with us. He is truly our heavenly father!