This year was the first year that I attended RUF Summer Conference at Laguna Beach, Florida.
It was awesome. It was an entire week of learning, having fun, eating, and not getting enough sleep.
It was so awesome that I wanna take some time to recap some of the most significant things I learned while I was there–the first of those being what it means to “take up your cross” and to “die to yourself.”
I didn’t understand them because I didn’t understand what it meant to forgive others. I always figured it was some happy zen moment where I would think, “I am at peace. Therefore, I can forgive my brother/sister for his/her sin against me.”
Haha. Yeah. Right.
Forgiving others for their sins against me (or my loved ones) means I will never have the vengeance I want for what they’ve done, and that sucks. The pain of knowing that I can’t make that person pay is there to give me a glimpse into what God felt when he came down as Jesus to die on the cross for my sins.
God gave up his right to vengeance by forgiving us so that we could know his love for us and it cost him a lot to do it. Therefore, in my love for others, I should also “take up my cross” and “die to myself”–even for those who I don’t think deserve it (Colossians 1:21-22, Romans 7:4).
Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll never be able to confront others for their sins, because even though our sins are forgiven before God, He still disciplines us out of love for us. But that’s a topic for another blog post.