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Job 13:25-26 "Wilt thou frighten a driven leaf and pursue dry chaff? For thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me inherit the iniquities of my youth." 

 

I frequently look back on the iniquities of my youth and feel so bad about them. Job reminds me that is like chasing dry chaff, there is no life there. I wonder, though, how God defines youth. I tend to think it can be any age before we have had our true conversion, or reversion. I was raised Catholic, I knew the rituals and sometimes-to-usually did them. But I did not have a relationship with God in any meaningful sense until later in life. I think it started in my 30s, and grew slowly but surely. I would like to think of my sins before that began, and even those committed during the early stages of my reversion, as the "iniquities of my youth". I hope God looks at them that way. I was stupid. I didn't understand, nor really think too much about, God's laws. I was a child, even as an adult.

 

I think we are always children to God, how could we not be? He calls to us all our lives until we hear Him (hopefully), and I think that He is especially forgiving of our sins committed before we really knew Him. I am so grateful Jesus gave us the Sacrament of Reconciliation. When I start to dwell on my past sins, I remember that I have been forgiven, they have been washed away through God's mercy. As long as I have truly repented of them, chasing them down in my memory is like pursuing dry chaff, a waste of my time and energy and a diversion from what God is asking me to do today.