Say sorry

A baptism of repentance (1:4) 

As I chatted to my friend the conversation got onto our children and she asked a perfectly simple question: how is Caleb getting on at school? I told her that the school were doing a good job but their efforts could not compensate for Caleb's lack of peers. 'Either' I explained, 'the children are damaged at birth, often leaving them physically affected and with language problems, or they are autistic and quite bright. There are very few children with Down Syndrome because they are all killed before they are born'. 

And now as I sit over my coffee it has struck me again. My son has no friends because this country has killed them all. My government have conspired with certain medical interests to eliminate all his peers. He will spend a lifetime alone and isolated because we have allowed his kind to be decimated for our comfort. And as I sit here the weight of it floods over me. The deep sorrow, the sadness for my son, the empty hardness of heart that has allowed it to happened with no protest. 

What if John's baptism is not so much about water as about repentance: it is repentance in which we are to be submerged, washed, drowned even. Only when we feel the full weight of sorrow for sin flooding through us can we re-emerge to forgiveness. Not merely cathartic but creative, released into a new way of being. Let us pray that such a spirit of repentance floods our country.



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