Now I rejoice, not because you were grieved but because your grief led to repentance, for you felt a godly grief, so that you were not harmed in any way by us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death. – 2 Corinthians 7:9-10(NRSVUE)
If you are following our Lenten devotion book based on the sayings of the desert fathers and mothers, today’s quotation comes from Abba Mius of Belos. The devotion is based on his best-known quotation, about obedience. I commend following the devotional booklet to you.
For this devotion, I wanted to delve a little deeper into Abba Mius, using the book The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which is also the sourcebook for the Lenten booklet. There actually is not very much from Abba Mius, less than a page. This story, though, caught my attention:
A soldier asked Abba Mius if God accepted repentance. After the old man had taught him many things he said, “Tell me, my dear, if your cloak is torn, do you throw it away?” He replied, “No, I mend it and use it again.” The old man said to him, “If you are so careful about your cloak, will not God be equally careful about his creature”
In the Lenten season where we focus on repentance, it can be easy to think that we must start from seeing ourselves as horrible and worthless. Yet this is completely the opposite of where we ought to begin. Abba Mius reminds us to start with how wonderfully made we are as God’s good creation. We are a prized part of God’s creation. God values us enough to take the time and effort to heal our brokenness; mending us so that we can live out the purpose that God has for us. Rather than repentance starting with how bad we are, it truly begins in recognizing how wonderfully made we are and how much God loves us. Because of that we want to tend to those part of our lives that fall short of who we were created to be. In this way repentance can in fact be a joyful experience of recognizing who we are and whose we are.