Turn again

The most ordinary and most necessary break in the whole Christian life is the one we call repentance, and the word itself is plainer than our solemn feelings about it. To repent is to turn: to break off the direction you were walking and face the other way. Peter stands at Solomon's porch and tells the crowd that this turning is not a punishment but a doorway. Repent, he says, and turn again, so that your sins may be blotted out and times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. The turning opens onto refreshing; it is the way back into the presence, not the price of admission to it. And the invitation reaches all the way back through the prophet Joel, flung wide and urgent: even now, says the LORD, turn to me with all your heart. Even now. Not once you have cleaned yourself up, not after you have earned the right, but now, in the middle of the wrong direction, the turn is open. The break of repentance is the one break that is never too late to make.

The break you most need may not be dramatic at all. It may simply be to turn around. We make repentance heavier than God does, picturing it as groveling, as a long sentence of self-punishment we have to serve before we are allowed back. It is nothing of the kind. Repentance is the clean disconnect from a direction that was quietly killing you and the turn back toward the One who was there the whole time. And notice, every time, what it opens onto: not condemnation but refreshing, the cool relief of the presence you had wandered out of. The word even now is the most important word in it. Whatever you have done, however long you have walked the wrong way, however many times you have walked it before, the turn is still open to you this minute. You do not have to arrive somewhere first. You only have to turn. That is the whole of it, and it is never, ever too late.