Repentance never ends

"Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." Isaiah 55:7

I had planned on starting a blog for some time before the word was given that we could start one on our missions. One of the reasons was to chart my progress in developing a more luminous life, or becoming more self-aware and applying that self-awareness. I was also going to be discussing some of the issues that I struggle with, most principally depression, and how I was getting on with resolving it as best as I could.

That second thing is what I'm going to ever-so-lightly touch upon. You see, there's a little agent in my head that is responsible for saying "You're doing enough" or "You're not doing enough." Something playing havoc with that agent was the idea that all of these people that I admired were complete. They were finished products. They were demigods, you could say, and everything that followed was merely them continuing to add awesome deeds to their pedigree ala Heracles. Christopher Lee was already a boss by the time that I rolled along. It was not a question of whether Terry Pratchett would write a book that deserved to be remembered for generations but how many: how many books, and how many generations.

History doesn't remember the guys that don't do anything worth being remembered for. Reading up on it, it was often easy to forget that they didn't just stroll into this gig, knowing deep down it was all inevitable and they just needed to mouth the words until It Happened.

Because I forgot this, I began cultivating in myself, without consciously realizing that it was my own doing, a desperate need to be finished. I couldn't be, when I was forty, that guy who knows the scriptures front and back or that guy with twenty-five published novels to his name, or that guy who had sorted out his problems and never broke down. I had to be that guy now, if I ever would be.

Obviously this isn't true, or I wouldn't be writing this now. We are always "in-progress," never done, never the final product. There is always room for improvement, and what is important is where I am headed. What I want to do now is draw a connection from this idea, and link it to something theological. Repentance, specifically.

Repentance is an ongoing process. There is always something we can improve on. President Hinckley said once, that even as President of the Church, he still had to repent every day. The issue at hand is not whether you need to repent nor even, really, how much but whether or not you are repenting at all.

A righteous man may stop repenting and thus become wicked, and the most wicked man in the world, at the moment that he turns himself toward God and begins to repent, can become righteous. Don't worry about where you've been; worry about where you're going.