Faith Matters | Confession is good for the soul. But there’s usually more work still to do
I almost got a crown today. It wasn’t a crown of Glory — more like a dental one. And I did say that I almost got it. I’ve been struggling with a weird pain in my tooth for a couple weeks now and my dentist (who is amazing) and I were planning on moving in the direction of a crown. But recently the pain has subsided a bit and he couldn’t find the exact cause of it, either by sight or x-ray. Together we determined that we should try a few other things before moving into a full-blown crown, even though I was sitting right there in his dental chair blocking out two hours of his schedule today for the purposes of said crown.
There are some things in life that require immediate action. If you get into a major car wreck, you don’t wait around to see if the car is damaged, especially if your passenger side door is laying in the middle of the street. But, there are other things, like my current tooth situation, that require a more patient and nuanced approach. Not everything can be fixed immediately — nor should it.
I think about this each Sunday when our church enters into a time of prayer of confession. The saying is that “confession is good for the soul.” For many people, that is a true statement. But I think confession by itself is just a start to a process of reconciliation and redemption. If I confess, whether privately or publicly, that I did something that I felt distanced my relationship to someone or to God, and then turned right around and did the same exact thing over again, I really haven’t been transformed. That’s where repentance comes into the picture.
To repent means to “turn away from.” Confession without repentance might feel good for a moment but will not lead to the type of transformation that so many of us desperately seek. Confession is immediate, repentance can take some time.
Dr. Wasson and I agree that this situation with my tooth isn’t exactly an easy fix. Sure, he could have gone ahead and just given me the crown, but what if that wasn’t the problem? What if it wasn’t even that tooth that was causing the problem? Together we both felt that there were too many unknowns and things unresolved. But that doesn’t mean this is over. It means that I still have some work to do. I’m going to have to pay really close attention to those moments when the pain arises. I’ve got to switch toothpaste for a little while. I’m going to have to be very careful about how and what I eat. And it’s highly likely that there’s going to be some unresolved shoots of pain that arise along the way.
Once we are aware of the brokenness in our lives, it can take some work to prepare ourselves for restoration. There’s some serious soul-searching that needs to be done and questions to wrestle with on the road to redemption. It’s not just as easy as saying, “I have a problem. Fix it.” It’s more of inviting God into the situation and walking together to a place of greater spiritual health. That work is so worth it because it can lead to actual transformation, not just confession.
It may turn out that I end up with a crown after all. But, when that day comes, I will be fully prepared for it, confident of how it will transform my life or, at least, my mouth.
Faith Matters is written by members of the clerical community in the Bradenton area. Rev. Hope Italiano Lee is the lead pastor at Kirkwood Presbyterian Church in Bradenton, www.bigreenchurch.org.