I’ve been running away from pain for a long time. 

When you live life like that, it--ironically--causes a lot of unintentional heartache. I've done some really stupid things to try and control pain—and none of them worked. Like I said, they only made things worse. I probably caused myself more pain by running from it than I would have experienced otherwise. Running away from pain affects everything.

Watching Making a Murderer is an exercise in frustration. There are moments when you believe, without a doubt, that you have zeroed in on the truth. You shake your head, believing, that you’ve finally gotten that key piece of evidence that makes all the jumbled pieces shake into place. Then it all falls apart. The picture that looked so clear moments before is skewed and unsatisfying. It is a peek into the complexity, and injustice, of a fallen and broken world—no matter your final belief about the people involved.

It is a reminder of our inability to rightly judge another.

It is unfortunate that anyone has to be in a position to decide whether someone is innocent or guilty. But, without a system of justice, and those willing to put their lives on the line to uphold it, society would fall apart. I get that. But it is a flash of divine wisdom, I believe, that we would—when considering any life's future of those made in the image of God—consider any reasonable doubt must be fully accepted as that person’s innocence.

In criminal law, Blackstone’s ratio is that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".

I don’t think many Christians believe that at times.

Our ability to judge is severely limited by a) our own sinfulness, and b) our lack of insight into the life and motivation of others. Yet, even knowing that, I'm sure I'll judge some poor sucker before the day's over. 

Once we have been redeemed, we sometimes tend to fall into an ideology which tempts us to harshly judge those who “are as [we] once were” (1 Cor 6:11). Steve Brown often says that a cat will never sit on a hot stove more than once, but he’ll never sit on a cold stove again either. His point is that we sometimes mislearn lessons. 

That’s what I think happens to us as Christians.

Instead of realizing the simple fact that Christ saves sinners, of whom I am the worst (sorry, Paul), and offering the gift of free forgiveness we were given in Christ to others who are perishing in their sin, we instead see ourselves as better than them.

How dumb is that?

It’s like the story Jesus told about the guy who owed a bajillion bucks (I paraphrase) to the king in Matthew 18:21-35. The debtor couldn’t pay him, so the king ordered he and his family be sold to repay the debt. The man begged for mercy. Then, in a wild act of grace, the king felt pity and forgave the debt. THEN, the first thing this guy did was run out and grab a man, who owed him just a few hundred bucks, by the scruff of his neck and demanded repayment. This guy also begged for mercy, but the debtor had none and threw the guy who owed him a pittance compared to his own debt in jail until his debt was paid.

Do you see it? How foolish we are to point out the speck of sawdust in another’s eyes missing the two-by-four in our own? How ignorant of the mercy we’ve been shown when we hold back forgiveness because we perceive someone’s debt bigger than the one we owed.

Jesus’ parable shows that every sin against us is a pittance compared to what He has forgiven.

I don’t know if Steven Avery is innocent. That's not what this post is about. But I know that his story, as presented in that documentary, reminded me that my judgment is weak. That I don’t know the whole story of anyone’s life or how someone else has twisted it for their own purposes or filtered it through their own prejudices--even me.

All I know is that my debt is forgiven, and that my job is to love, not pass judgment on any and everyone (1 cor 5:12). Love, boys and girls, triumphs over judgment (James 2:13). Human judgment  itself is an exercise in frustration when it is done outside of the knowledge of God's grace in one's own life.
We make a lot out of the New Year. I’ve never really thought about it as an odd thing until this year. It was just what you did. You celebrated with friends, watched a ball drop (!) and screamed like a silly person at midnight. Then you make promises to yourself about how you’re going to do better this year, and hope like heck you actually follow through.

I think that’s the evidence that all the weird ball-worshipping, booze swilling hoopla comes from a desire for a fresh beginning. We’ll do anything for a new beginning.

A Stopped Clock

If you want to be realistic and overly rigid about it, there’s really no difference in December 31st and January 1st. It’s just another step down the road. Another sunrise like any other sunrise. But it’s symbolic to us. It’s the burning remains of all our bad choices and cruddy decisions finally sizzling to a stop and then wildly rising from the ashes once more. It’s that fabled fresh slate made whole cloth from an arbitrary date on a calendar.

A chance to forgive ourselves.

We tell ourselves that all that garbage happened last year—in another life. This is the new me. This is the 2016 me. 2015 me ate too much, drank too much, smoked too much and was a bit grumpy. But 2016 me is going to break the mold and finally reach those goals that seemed ever further out of reach every day until the clocked struck midnight.

Not to be a negative nelly, but you probably won’t. Reach those goals, I mean. You might! Hope springs eternal, and all that. And people do accomplish things. Dreams come true left and right. But what if they don’t? What if this year is just another uneventful slog through the calendar? Worse, what if life decides to give you a good old-fashioned punch in the gut? What if you screw up worse than you ever thought you could and face next year’s midnight shame-faced and tired again?

What if I told you that you didn’t need to wait until next year for a clean slate? What if I said that all your resolutions can swirl down the potty of good intentions and you could still stand absolved? What if there was some sort of eternal state of New Year’s, where the clock stopped at midnight and decided to stay there, right at the moment of your fresh wholeness?

A Different Kind of Water

Jesus came to a well and a woman was there. She offered to get him a drink of water and He said, “I’ve got water you don’t even know about. Water, that if you drink it, you’ll never be thirsty again.”

So, the clock just stops. You’re in an eternally present new beginning. Everything’s fresh, new and forgiven. You’re clean. What do you do now? 

What would you do if you fully realized that you didn’t have to work for it? If you knew you were forgiven and couldn’t screw it up because every moment was New Year’s? Every split second was a new beginning? If you could get out of your own head and just trust that you weren’t going to die of thirst?

How would you live?

As a follower of Jesus, your thirst is eternally slaked. You’re forgiven. Clean. You live in the eternal Happy New Year. Now that you don’t have to worry about earning it, what are you going to do?