February 21st

Whenever I make a mistake while typing I tend to erase everything until the error point. Say I write ‘fiath’ instead of ‘faith.’ Rather than go back to the misplaced a or i, I simply would hit the backspace key and remove all the letters, even the correct ones, following the mistake. Even if it’s a long word, or even a short phrase, my natural instinct is to just lean on the backspace key rather than being more selective about my error correction.
‘Tis rather a trivial thing, I know, but it kind of bugs me because it’s as if I am taking the good out with the bad. Instead of being selective and extracting only the letter that is either incorrect or out of place I delete the whole word. Sure, I guess it’s easier or maybe even faster. After all, one way or another I have to get back to the error-point so hitting the backspace key and wiping out everything up to including the mistake is very efficient. It means I take care of business without having to first return to the scene of the crime and then erase the boo-boo and enter the correction.
Hitting the backspace key, I guess, is just faster and simpler. On the other hand, it does seem wasteful. Not all the letters erased are wrong, so rubbing them out means I have to put them back in later on. Being more selective with what I delete would spare me having to rekey the good stuff I had already entered which means faster and simpler goes right out the window.
Call it instinct. It’s what I do. Maybe you do it to. Maybe like me, when you’re  typing you toss out the good along with the bad when you make a boo-boo. Nothing really wrong with that. It happens. I wonder, however, what it would be like if we did that with bigger, more important things. Imagine tossing out a whole page of text because of one mistake. Or perhaps digging up an entire garden because one flower dies. Or giving up a whole life just due to one wrong decision.
Foolish, isn’t it? Sheer nonsense to think of wiping out a complete effort just due to one slip up. Better instead to get rid of the one thing that is wrong, to cross out the typo on the sheet of paper, to pull up the one dead flower, or to move on from a poor choice.
That’s what God does with us. When we make a mistake, God forgives us and encourages us to carry on. The good stuff remains, the bad stuff goes away. Sometimes it happens right away, right the moment we are aware that we blew it. Sometimes it takes a lifetime before we figure out where we’ve gone wrong and that there’s a better way to do things. Whenever it happens,  God is ready and willing to erase that one bad bit from His memory so we can be as close to Him as possible. Unlike a typo, however, God leaves us the lessons we’ve learned from our boo-boo. He forgets it, he gets rid of our guilt and shame, but leaves enough of a trace of it so that we can know what to avoid later on. Not too much, not too little, God’s forgiveness takes out only what’s bad, which is very good for us. At least that’s the way I see it.