Ruins. We don’t have too many of these in the United States. The more time I spend away from home the more I realize just how young America is. Random nugget. While I was in Sofia I went on a walking tour with some of the members of team 2:20, as we walked around the theme of history of course dominated the tour. The palace of Justice wears the scars of WWII and of communism, the first floor designed and built in an ornate way, while the next few floors are very plain. There are churches that date back to early years of our faith that are bricks that were made before the world even knew that my country even existed. I mean some people knew about it, but they weren’t sharing that secret. In Sofia they’ve found the walls of the original city that lay there when the Roman’s ruled the area when they were blasting for the metro. How incredible would that be, “Hey I was blasting through the dirt and I came across this wall that was built a few hundred years ago, you know.”
The one story that really stood out to me was the story of the royal gardens, once belonging strictly to the royal family were opened up to the public under the communist regime and when one of the greatest communist leaders of Bulgaria passed away this park became home to his mausoleum, one of the largest in Europe. When communism fell in the 1990’s the mausoleum was taken down, people didn’t want that reminder of their past up. The thing is, the area where it was still holds the scars of the mausoleums existence.
If we try to deny our past, try to tear it down to forget it, does it really “go away”? We all have regrets, I know I do, things I have done, said or not said that haunt us. One of the many things that God is working out on me is that I can’t deny what happened in the past, it doesn’t need to define me and He can use it, He can redeem it. In order for Him to be able to redeem it though I need to bring it to Him and walk in repentance. I, as God’s daughter, walk in His grace and as a result walk in freedom. This doesn’t mean that I don’t regret my past, it means that I’m able to look back at it and know God is greater than it, that He uses screw ups and that He’s perfect, and I am not. Since He is the greatest author of all, He can use my past to make His story through me great. When I dig down into the dirt of my soul, I’ll find the foundations that really hold me up, and they can stand the test of time. Ruins, who knew that you would have so much to teach me, oh yeah, God did. It’s pretty awesome how He knows everything and uses everything to draw us into deeper relationship and dependence on Him.
