Weird

So at my friends' wedding this past weekend, I was standing in the drink line. They had an open bar that night, and most of the people in their 20s were taking full advantage. So this guy I met about an hour earlier sidles up next to me and starts yacking in my ear.

His name was Paul, and he was a tall blond guy, and he was pretty strange. He had clearly had quite a bit to drink, but not so much that he couldn't confess some very strange things to me. He started telling me that he was a bad guy (his words), and that he was going to do some bad things after the wedding. He rambled on about some money and going to a certain part of town. The weirdest part of all this to me? He prefaced it all by confirming that I was "a preacher" (again, his words). I told him that I was in ministry, and then he began to dump his sins on me.

It was surprising to say the least. But as Paul was having his verbal diarrhea in my direction, I wondered what possessed him to do that. I think deep down, we all want to just bare our dark secrets to people. We want to feel released from our weaknesses and our downfalls. I think Paul wanted to be absolved somehow, for someone to tell him he was ok, and that it wasn't a big deal.

Honestly, I would have loved nothing more than to do that. That was kind of impossible for a few reasons. The first was that I had no idea what he was really talking about. The second, and more important, is that I don't think it works like that. I don't think that we can simply verbally unload our wrongdoings and they go away. It would be great if they did. But I have to believe that Jesus died for a reason. And if Jesus died for a reason, then it was in some way to help people do something that they couldn't do themselves. And if that is the case, then we somehow have to buy into his plan to get the benefits.

We all desperately wish we could just speak our sins and they would vanish. But the clear price of sin is that we have killed our souls. After that, we have a couple options. We can buy into the death Jesus died, and let him take care of our sins, or we can continue to try to get rid of them ourselves. Those are not things you explain to Paul in the drink line at a wedding celebration when he has clearly already had too much. But they are things I can hope and pray that someone will be able to share with him, because I think deep down, we all want to get rid of the terrible weight of our wrong doings.