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Jesus tells his disciples in Luke 24 to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins.

What exactly is repentance and why do I need to be the one to forgive?

I agree with Richard Rohr in that the best way to look at this is with the image of a circle. All circles have centers and circumferences. I propose God wants us to live our lives from the center of our circles. This is the place we feel welcomed, loved, and whole. It is the place we feel forgiven.

The hard part is society and our dogged egos want to live life on the circumference. This is a much showier life. This is a shallower life that receives tremendous praise and blame from others.

And I think deep down you know what I am talking about when I say living a life on the circumference. It’s the furthest point from the center while still being in the circle. It is calling yourself a Christian and changing nothing about your ordinary life. We are all circumference people. We substitute spiritual for superficial. We want quick and easy before we get challenging and thought-provoking.

So what is repentance? My dad always said, “Repentance is an about face.” It’s literally turning 180 degrees and walking in the other direction. But be ready, when you make the move towards the center, you are faced with the reasons why you are at the circumference. A lot of us push ourselves away from God because we feel unlovable or too broken to be fixed. We chalk up our losses and pack up and move from God for fear that God would hate us if we tried to go home.

I call this living as our unacceptable self. All of us have an understanding of our unacceptable self. It is the part of our self we are most afraid. It’s the self we wish we could fix but can’t. We feel smothered and trapped by it.

Living as our unacceptable self makes us feel guilty and unlovable. It convinces us we have gone too far and there is no way out. But the irony is when we name this sin in our lives then we stop allowing it to have control over us. When we recognize that we live this way, then we can move towards the center.

The reason why your unacceptable self cannot see the light is because you are walking away from it. If you repent and turn around, you are met with one million watts of forgiveness shining a path for you to tread.

The problem is over time our unacceptable self becomes our inner voice. We try so hard not to be someone we forget how to live freely and affectionately with who we are at the center of our lives. We start guarding ourselves and pushing our identity to the circumference. We become guarded, jaded, ridged, and invulnerable. Our persona attempts to live perfectly instead of holy.

Repentance acknowledges this pitfall and seeks to turn from it. To turn from the circumference is to turn towards the center – to start moving toward wholeness. It’s the inward journey to the center of your soul. It is moving back home. It is moving back to the point in which life matters and has purpose. You feel a depth about yourself and a conviction about your spirituality. You feel more unified with God at the center because low and behold that is where God resides.

But trust me on this. You don’t choose your center. All you can do is repent – turn from your circumference and start heading towards your center. Your center finds you. When you make the move back towards wholeness, God will be right there waiting.