The Healing of Memories

Why contradict grace? Why reopen beleaguered wounds and delay the metamorphosis grace promises? What summons us to find sordid pleasure in self-inflicted lesions -- slumbering dragons awakened by self-pity. Enough is enough! The enemy has gained a purchase in too many lives. For every individual who foists pain on herself or himself over and over for a hurt done to them or done by them in the past, let the healing begin:

"More even than our bodies, she said, it was these hurtful memories that needed healing. For God, all time is one, and we were to invite Jesus into our past as into a house that has been locked up for years -- to open windows and doors for us so that life and light could enter at last, to sweep out the debris of decades, to drive back the shadows.  The healing of memories was like the forgiveness of sins, she said."   

(A pulsating truth that Buechner received first-hand from Agnes Sanford many years ago.)