Hard Lessons

I learned the lesson hard this week.  The lesson I've been working on for so long now, but still have not mastered.  The lesson of silence. 

And I cried silently to learn it again yesterday, because words cannot be taken back and sometimes it's only God you can go to forgiveness for, heart aching, knowing that I am ugly in sin.

And sometimes the tenderizing of our hearts, is like the swift blow of the kitchen tool used on a slab of meat, piercing it bloody.  I wish I'd learned my lesson before that point. 

Everything is heard by God.  I speak, thinking nothing of it, in passing, lightly, carelessly, jokingly and I think it doesn't matter.  It doesn't seem to matter to anyone else.  But God hears my words.  And I hear them again, even years later, convicted. 

And this morning, I'm reading an old journal from just a few months back, and I find that I wrote on Henri Nouwen's view of the importance of silence.  I wrote about it here too.  Why can't lessons take?

This entry written sometime in November came right after I wrote Psalm 1 to aid in memorization, "Blessed is the man who does not...sit in the seat of mockers" 

I didn't merely sit in the seat, I headed the table. 

I wrote:  "Our silences should far outweigh our words...The mouth begs to be heard but the ears want not to listen.  Why have I placed myself above God with my misuse of too many words?  Why do I worship words that travel into the air, landing nowhere?  Why do I fight retreat and the desert?  I desire to dwell with the world and be recognized and my mouth screams for attention...I refuse to practice silence...If I speak or write should it not only be to repeat the Gospel without apologies or doubt but to say it again for others because it is life giving and redemptive and the only true importance?"

Maybe I should read that every day.  Because daily I forget and it is an awful thing to find in the pages of one's journal a heart that was previously softened and recognize it not as such at current.

Staying unconfessed will ruin us.  The only hope for redemption is repentance.  Turning away.  Living in that hardness, no more.