What needs to change in your life?

And another thing!

Repent! For the kingdom of God has come near!

It’s the sermon John the Baptist preaches. It’s the first sermon Jesus preaches. And it’s the theme that ties together Exodus 32:7-14, Psalm 51, and 1 Timothy 1:12-17.

“Repent” is a churchy word. We don’t hear it much outside of church contexts. But we use the concept all the time. Repenting is turning around (in Hebrew) or changing one’s mind (in Greek). We do both of those things all the time. We pull meetings back on track when the conversation wanders. We change our minds about ideas. We turn around when we’re on the wrong road, literally and metaphorically. Anywhere our navigation software says, “recalculating,” we might hear “repent!”

We could look at recalculating as a sign that something has gone wrong. Often, people don’t want to admit that they’ve changed their minds. It’s seen as a weakness to say that after more thought, we’ve come to a different conclusion. How we got to a point where admitting that we’ve thought more about something is a negative, I don’t know. What I do know is that getting back on the right road is always the right move.

Repenting is courageous. Showing back up to the gym after a little too long off takes effort. Apologizing to someone we’ve hurt takes some bravery. Changing bad habits, picking up good habits, adjusting our time or money or social lives to align more with who God has made us to be, those all take intentionality. They take the willingness to admit that we might screw up again—the ways we’ve been doing things are comfortable—and to keep going anyway.

In Exodus, we see a rare moment where God’s mind even changes. Moses and God are arguing like parents with children who just won’t behave. God’s original plan is to wipe everyone out and rebuild. Moses’s descendants will take the place of Aaron’s. Moses, who knows the frustration of leading these people, convinces God to have mercy. What will people say if God saved the tribes of Israel from slavery only to kill them all in the wilderness? God relents. God repents. God changes his mind.

If the Lord God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, can rethink things, it might just be true that we can, too.

I don’t have an agenda with this post. I don’t know what you need to repent about. As a flawed human being, I live with the constant certainty that I don’t know what I need to repent about. I have the hope that when I do know how I need to change, I’ll have the courage to do better. God grants us the freedom to repent. God loves us before and after. God empowers us to be merciful and to change in the ways that bring in the kingdom of God. For that, I am grateful.