March has been a very strange month. If I'm honest, February was no less strange, but it was more actively strange and March is a suspension between action and forward movement. It is a month of waiting. What I am waiting for, I'm not ready to say publicly, but either way, waiting is an uncomfortable place to be. Facing down a monumental life change (to me, doubtless it would not be to many other people), caught between how things have been and how things will be, I find my past catching up with me and asking for resolutions before I move forward into something new.

During the last four weeks, I have been mainlining the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, as well as the writings of the Church Fathers. On the one hand, this kind of mass consumption of literature makes it difficult to stop and digest the small things. This is not close-reading. This is wholesale brain-reshaping. It is intentional and determined.

The last four and a half years have been years of parenting very small kids while going through grad school, and it definitely shaped my brain and my heart and my perspectives. Most of these have been positive things, but some have not. Some things have made my heart hard to things I should have avoided, and opened me up to situations and choices that might have been obvious had I not been so distracted by the voices and hopes and desires that surrounded me.

This is not a confessional where I'm going to lay out all the sins of my heart from the last 4+ years. Definitely not. It is a place where I'm going to work through my thoughts on what it is to live in repentance. A really strong influence on me through grad school and currently is a friend I made there, an Antiochian Orthodox priest who speaks about life as a constant chance for repentance.

We live surrounded by people (I'm going to refer to "men" a lot because it so often is very powerful men, but let's be clear, women are included in this) who commit horrible sins, crimes, atrocities, and when it becomes obvious they are going to face consequences like ostracization or loss of power, they "repent". They issue apologies. They have loud, vociferous "come to Jesus" moments that they have publicly, and then "the church" – here referring to the Evangelical political machine that is unrelated to The Church – welcomes them back with open arms, citing desire for reconciliation.

That is not how this works. It is certainly not how God works. Repentance, turning from your past actions and reorienting your entire life to repair the harm you have done, is not a mediocre apology and a return to glory. Repentance is when you acknowledge the wrong you have done at the very core of your being and accept the consequences. It is not saying, "I'm really really sorry I killed that guy in anger, so I shouldn't have a prison sentence", or "I'm super sorry I sexually abused women over whom I had power, so I shouldn't lose any of my power." Actual repentance involves knowing that you should never have any of that power again, that you deserve the social stigma and ostracization of having done real harm in the world, and then spending years, probably the rest of your life, working to atone for it.

When Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) repents in the Bible, he says, "Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount." We assume he makes good on this promise, but it is only after this repentance that acknowledges the harm, attempts to rectify it over and beyond the initial crime, and a total change of trajectory (giving half your stuff to the poor? What would that do to your lifestyle?) that Jesus says, "Today salvation has come to this house."

The easy part has been done. I have looked at this as it applied to the really nasty men who have done unbelievable amounts of harm and faked repentance to get out of justice. I can sit comfortably in my home and judge Kanye West and Mark Driscoll and scores of others for failing to repent and judge "the church" for failing to hold anybody accountable.

Unfortunately, this is where the mass intake of Church Fathers and the Pentateuch as well as the wise advice of my friend come into things. I cannot apply these words to other people and be satisfied with myself. The call, over and over again, is to apply them to my own way of living. Every moment is an opportunity for me to repent. For the last few months, I have been in a process of identifying and repenting of sins with the goal of escaping the pain and consequences of my actions. I go to the Lord and confess and hope that gets me out of the bad part of repentance.

When we talk about consequences, I don't mean punishment. God is not looking to smite me or anybody else. He has laid enough natural consequences out before us. When I look at how I've prioritized things incorrectly in my life, the natural consequences are things like, my kids having a mom who wasn't patient or present when she needed to be. My husband getting frustrated and lonely because I wasn't making time for him and that frustration spilling over into the household. A chaos in my life that comes from my own lack of self-discipline (we aren't talking about a messy house, we are talking about certain areas of selfishness that lead to imbalance in the household). The hardest is seeing my kids suffer from my own actions.

In this last month particularly, I've been learning to embrace the consequences not as fun or something to get out of, but as a natural part of the repentance process. I am already forgiven and in communion with God. When the pain or grief of my sin overwhelm me, I know He is there to help me get through it. He is letting me go through it because it is how I grow stronger and because it is what is best for me, but He is with me through it.

A final note, for many years now I have used the Jesus Prayer, sometimes called the Prayer of a Single Thought (derived and reminiscent of the prayer of the tax collector in Luke 18:10-14) to center myself. The full version is, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." When my heart is overwhelmed, as has often been the case especially with the state of the nation and the world this last year, it is simply, "Lord, have mercy." Any time my thoughts stray even vaguely into dangerous territory, I recite it over and over, focusing on what it means for the Lord to have mercy on me, and how much He always has.

I pray now and always, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner." And He does.