“It Is Finished” confession IS GOOD for the SOUL.

I had a revelation during Sunday morning service that I wanted to share as a way of unburdening the soul. The passage of scripture taken from the sixteenth chapter of Acts. Their Paul and Silas were bound in prison, and a jailor was charged with keeping watch on them. In the course of events, a cataclysmic earthquake intervened in such severity that they were set free from bondage. The jailer at once, having realized his complicity in their escape, and that the warden would hold him severely responsible for their flight, sized things up in his mind. Having purged his conscience of self-respect, he considered the best-case scenario would be to “fall on his sword,” thus escaping this life and his misdeeds, and would have done so had his charges not have intervened on his sake. The story goes on, but this has nothing to do with suicide. But it got me to thinking nonetheless about one’s complicity in events and embarrassment of failures when faced with a similar to the jailers’ plight —and equally shameful episodes of my own life. 

In a similar fashion to the earthquake that opened the prison cell in Phillipi, my revelation is on Stigma failure Embarrassment humiliation. I once took piano lessons as a child. When it came time for me to attend my first recital, my confidence failed me when I realized the audience was expecting me to perform for them, something that I was not able to give. I don’t remember what I did, but I do what I didn’t. I didn’t play the piece I had practiced with such repetition to perfection, but a bit unknown to any human ear. I was so ashamed of my failure to give the performance I had prepared for that I quit piano lessons altogether and never returned, to my teacher’s, parent’s, and ultimately my dismay. A stigma followed me from that point on, and my life followed suit; my confidence never fully recovered from that childhood trauma. To make a very long story short, after living through struggles of a diverse sort, I am regaining that essential ingredient in life, which was so quickly lost. Still, now after coming full-circle, reconciliation has been made with the past. Although I never returned to the piano circuit, you might say, I located my niche buried in forgotten lore, and am pursuing goals more suited to my unique abilities. And through it, all, reclaiming a bit of myself lost long ago. And as is it goes, “they all lived happily ever after .”