Isaiah 1:18 and Scarring

Here's the latest conundrum. I was reading Christianity Today's article 3 Fibs and a Truth About Sex today, and I came across Isaiah 1:18 quoted: "though our sins are scarlet, they can be made white as snow."

The context here is in disproving that "premarital sex leaves permanent scars." The article seems to be saying that these scars don't necessarily appear. Is it our sins that are sanctified, or are we sanctified as people and as children of God?

Anyway, I'm a big fan of scars...I've got lots of physical ones as well as more than enough emotional and spiritual scars. I just wish people got over this aversion to scars thing. Jesus had scars...they were what proved it was really Him to Thomas.

I'm a pastor now

I shudder at that thought. But anyway, I thought you should all know just how this happened, or at least, how it started. In fact, I had forgotten how it happened until I ran into one of the main characters of the story, the former church secretary, on Sunday at my ordination.

So sometime around late middle school, I was suffering from one of my many identity crises (they were like weekly back then), and so I decided to go to camp. It was kind of like Bible camp, except it was a Lutheran camp, so the kids were really there to meet members of the opposite sex. I was no exception.

I started out as the punk kid who wore green cargo pants, a black t-shirt, a backwards Raiders hat, and a silver ring on his pinky. My pitiful attempt at goth/punk. I also went by "J" instead of my actual name, "Jedidiah." And I found people who liked me and talked to me and accepted me in spite of all of this silliness.

But maybe the most influential thing that happened to me was during a q&a session with the camp pastor. Of course the obligatory questions were asked ("How are babies made?") but more interesting to me were questions like "If you could prove the existence of God, wouldn't that negate faith?" Yes, something was brewing underneath my thick skull.

Well, after the session, I was walking up to the next camp activity and the pastor started talking to me. We talked about my question a bit, but then the pastor said something that completely threw me off. He told me I should become a pastor.

I was kind of taken aback by this. I mean, this guy doesn't even know me! However, it stirred something in me so that I prayed OK God, if you really want me to be a pastor, I need another sign from someone else.

Well, not 2 months later, the church secretary (one of the two people in the church that knew everybody's name) came up to me and said "Hey Jed, I think you should become a pastor."

So that was it. I continued to run away from it for several more years, but as you can now tell, I was unsuccessful at my flight (see "Jonah"). But that's a different story for a different day.

In the meantime, I'm signing off, for the first time as...
Rev. Jedidiah T. Maschke